Laurent Mauvignier Wins Goncourt 2025; An Award That Should Be Framed!

According to Mehr News Agency, quoting Agence France-Presse, Laurent Mauvignier today (Tuesday) in Paris won the Goncourt Prize 2025 with ‘Empty House’. He succeeded Kamel Daoud, the French-Algerian author, who received this prize last year for his novel ‘Houriha’.

‘Empty House’, an epic 750-page family novel, can now hope to sell up to half a million copies after receiving this award.

The 58-year-old author succeeded in the first round of voting, surpassing his other final rivals including Belgian author Caroline Lamarche for the novel ‘Where It Is Vague’, Emmanuel Carrère with the novel ‘Kolkhouz’, and Natacha Appanah with the novel ‘Night at Heart’.

The number of Goncourt nominees was reduced from an initial list of 15 works to 8 books and then to 4 individuals, and finally, 10 members of the Goncourt Academy jury convened to decide the winner of the best French-language book of the year.

Although the Goncourt Prize winner receives a negligible check, after the award, thanks to extensive media coverage, sales of hundreds of thousands of copies of his books are guaranteed. According to reports, Goncourt Prize winners between 2018 and 2022 sold an average of 508,000 copies.

According to calculations made in 2023, with a book selling for an average price of 20 Euros, an average of 1.1 million Euros in revenue is generated for the book, although the author ultimately keeps only 8 to 15 percent of the sales revenue.

In any case, this year, as is customary every year, the Goncourt winner only received a check for 10 Euros. This amount is the lowest for a literary prize, with other French literary awards granting 1000 Euros for the Médicis Prize and 10,000 Euros for the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française. Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded by the Swedish Academy, also grants the winner 11,000,000 Swedish Kronor, or more than one million Euros, each year.

So what does a Goncourt Prize winner do with 10 Euros? Tahar Ben Jelloun, the 1987 prize winner, offered this suggestion in Le Point newspaper in 2023: Do not cash the 10 Euro check, frame it and keep it as a souvenir. He added: Some have cashed it; cashing a symbol has a bad effect!