Reading List · Literary Prizes
The Prix Goncourt pays ten euros. That is not a typo and not a joke at the winner’s expense: it is the last remnant of the five thousand francs Edmond de Goncourt left in his will in 1884, and the money has never been the point. Selling half a million copies is. The difficulty for anyone reading in English is that the prize is for books written in French, so the real question is not who won but which of them you can actually get. Of the twenty-six winners since 2000, twenty-two exist in English. Here they are, with their translators.
By Lisanne Swart · 26 winners since 2000, 22 of them in English · A cheque for €10 · Last reviewed 14 September 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book. Gary is there twice, and that is the point of him.
Last year Laurent Mauvignier took it on the first ballot, six votes to four, for La Maison vide. 8 The sixteen for this year are already out: four rounds in nine weeks, and it ends over lunch at Drouant on the third of November. 9
Quick answer
The Prix Goncourt is the biggest literary prize in France, awarded every November since 1903 by ten writers who hold their seats for life and decide over lunch. The winner gets a cheque for ten euros and, on recent form, several hundred thousand readers. You may only win it once, which one man got round by inventing a second novelist. Of the twenty-six winners since 2000, twenty-two have been translated into English — and knowing which four have not is the part nobody else writes down.
How this page chooses
Two jobs, kept apart. The table lists every winner from 2000 to 2025 with its French title and, where one exists, the English edition and the translator — facts only, including the four years where the honest entry is that there is nothing to buy.
Twenty-one get proper notes: twelve modern winners that are in English and worth the evening, and nine from before 2000 that a British or American reader might actually find in a shop. I read French slowly and badly, so every book below is one I am pointing you at in translation, which is also how I read it. Where a "read it if" is missing, it is because I had nothing useful to add.
In the order they won. The French title is under each one, because that is what you will need if you ever go looking in a French bookshop. 5
Les Bienveillantes
Nine hundred pages narrated by Maximilien Aue, an SS officer who survived the war, became a lace manufacturer in France and would like you to understand that he is not a monster but a man like you. Littell is American, wrote it in French, and won the Goncourt with it.
Syngué sabour
A woman sits beside her husband, who has a bullet in his neck and has not moved or spoken in weeks. She starts talking. Over a few days she tells him everything she was never allowed to say, and the room fills up with a marriage nobody had described out loud.
Trois femmes puissantes
Three stories that touch at the corners, between France and Senegal: a lawyer summoned by the father who threw her out, a man whose wife has left, a widow trying to reach Europe. NDiaye was the first Black woman to win it.
La Carte et le Territoire
An artist makes his name photographing Michelin maps, then paints portraits of people at work. One of his subjects is a novelist called Michel Houellebecq, who lives alone in Ireland with a dog and is murdered halfway through the book.
Au revoir là-haut
November 1918, days before the armistice, a lieutenant sends men over the top for no reason and two of them survive it: one with the lower half of his face gone, the other owing him his life. What they do next is a fraud involving war memorials.
Boussole
A musicologist in Vienna cannot sleep, has had bad news from his doctor, and spends one night going back through everything Europe took from the East and called its own. Aleppo, Palmyra and Tehran are in it as they were, which is now unbearable to read.
Chanson douce
The first sentence tells you the baby is dead. The rest works backwards through the year a Paris couple employed a nanny who was perfect, and what perfect cost. Published in America as The Perfect Nanny, which is the same book and the same translation.
L’Ordre du jour
February 1933: twenty-four German industrialists walk into a room in Berlin and agree to fund the Nazi party. Vuillard follows what that money bought, in 150 pages, naming the companies. Several of them are still on the shelf in your kitchen.
Leurs enfants après eux
Four summers in a dead steel valley in eastern France, 1992 to 1998. Anthony is fourteen in the first one and steals a canoe. Nothing much happens and everything is decided.
L’Anomalie
An Air France flight from Paris lands at JFK in March 2021. The same flight, with the same passengers, lands again in June. Everyone aboard now has to meet the version of themselves that has had three extra months. A million copies in print within a year.
La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes
A young Senegalese writer in Paris goes looking for the author of a 1938 novel who was hailed as a genius, accused of plagiarism, and then vanished. The search runs from Amsterdam to Buenos Aires and never quite lets you decide what it found.
Veiller sur elle
A sculptor of extraordinary talent and very small stature is dying in a monastery in the Italian hills, and the monks are waiting for it because of what he made and hid there. Forty years of friendship with an aristocrat’s daughter got him to that bed.
A century of this prize has produced a handful of books that ended up on every English-language shelf without anyone mentioning where they came from.
Le Feu
Written by a soldier while the war was still on, and published in 1916, which is the fact that matters. A squad in the trenches, told in the plural, in the language the men actually used. It is the book every later war novel is answering.
À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
The prize went to the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, not to the whole thing — the single most misreported fact about the Goncourt. The jury was attacked for it: Proust was forty-eight and the beaten book was a war novel, in 1919.
La Condition humaine
Shanghai, March 1927, the communist rising and its destruction, told over a few days by the people carrying it out. Malraux had been in Asia and wrote it as though reporting. Published in Britain first as Storm in Shanghai.
Les Mandarins
Paris after the liberation, and the French intellectual left arguing about what to do with having been right. Everyone in it resembles someone real, which Beauvoir denied, and the American lover is Nelson Algren, which she did not.
Les Racines du ciel
A man in French Equatorial Africa decides to stop the killing of elephants and will not be talked out of it, and everybody — colonial administrators, nationalists, journalists — decides he must really mean something else. Probably the first novel anyone wrote about conservation.
Le Roi des aulnes
A Paris garage owner with a private mythology about children is taken prisoner in 1939 and ends up recruiting boys for a Nazi military academy in East Prussia, believing he is saving them. Told partly in his own diary, which is the problem.
La Vie devant soi
Momo is an Arab boy in Belleville being raised by Madame Rosa, an ageing Jewish former prostitute and Auschwitz survivor who minds the children of working women. The voice is the whole book. Gary had already won in 1956 and was not allowed to win again, so this one won under a name he invented.
Rue des boutiques obscures
A detective with no memory of his own life takes on one last case: himself. Paris under the occupation is underneath every street he walks down. Modiano won the Nobel thirty-six years later for doing this repeatedly.
L’Amant
A girl of fifteen and a half in colonial Vietnam, a man in a black limousine, and a family that knows and takes the money. Duras wrote it at seventy about herself, in short blocks that jump years, and it sold a million copies in France.
Twenty-six years. The twelve in red have notes above. Four have no English edition: two that were never translated, and the two most recent, which are simply too new. 5
| Year | French title | Author | In English |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | Ingrid Caven | Jean-Jacques Schuhl | Ingrid Caven, tr. Michael Pye (City Lights, 2004) |
| 2001 | Rouge Brésil | Jean-Christophe Rufin | Brazil Red, tr. Willard Wood (Norton, 2004) |
| 2002 | Les Ombres errantes | Pascal Quignard | The Roving Shadows, tr. Chris Turner (Seagull, 2011) |
| 2003 | La Maîtresse de Brecht | Jacques-Pierre Amette | Brecht’s Mistress, tr. Andrew Brown (The New Press, 2005) |
| 2004 | Le Soleil des Scorta | Laurent Gaudé | The House of Scorta, tr. Hawkes & Sartarelli (2005) |
| 2005 | Trois jours chez ma mère | François Weyergans | No English translation traced |
| 2006 | Les Bienveillantes | Jonathan Littell | The Kindly Ones, tr. Charlotte Mandell (2009) |
| 2007 | Alabama Song | Gilles Leroy | No English translation traced |
| 2008 | Syngué sabour | Atiq Rahimi | The Patience Stone, tr. Polly McLean (2010) |
| 2009 | Trois femmes puissantes | Marie NDiaye | Three Strong Women, tr. John Fletcher (2012) |
| 2010 | La Carte et le Territoire | Michel Houellebecq | The Map and the Territory, tr. Gavin Bowd (2011) |
| 2011 | L’Art français de la guerre | Alexis Jenni | The French Art of War, tr. Frank Wynne (2017) |
| 2012 | Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome | Jérôme Ferrari | The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, tr. Geoffrey Strachan (2014) |
| 2013 | Au revoir là-haut | Pierre Lemaitre | The Great Swindle, tr. Frank Wynne (2015) |
| 2014 | Pas pleurer | Lydie Salvayre | Cry, Mother Spain, tr. Ben Faccini (2016) |
| 2015 | Boussole | Mathias Énard | Compass, tr. Charlotte Mandell (2017) |
| 2016 | Chanson douce | Leïla Slimani | Lullaby in the UK, The Perfect Nanny in the US, tr. Sam Taylor (2018) |
| 2017 | L’Ordre du jour | Éric Vuillard | The Order of the Day, tr. Mark Polizzotti (2018) |
| 2018 | Leurs enfants après eux | Nicolas Mathieu | And Their Children After Them, tr. William Rodarmor (2020) |
| 2019 | Tous les hommes n’habitent pas le monde de la même façon | Jean-Paul Dubois | Not Everybody Lives the Same Way, tr. David Homel (2022) |
| 2020 | L’Anomalie | Hervé Le Tellier | The Anomaly, tr. Adriana Hunter (2021) |
| 2021 | La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes | Mohamed Mbougar Sarr | The Most Secret Memory of Men, tr. Lara Vergnaud (2023) |
| 2022 | Vivre vite | Brigitte Giraud | Live Fast, tr. Cory Stockwell (Ecco, 2025) |
| 2023 | Veiller sur elle | Jean-Baptiste Andrea | Watching Over Her, tr. Frank Wynne (2025) |
| 2024 | Houris | Kamel Daoud | Not yet in English |
| 2025 | La Maison vide | Laurent Mauvignier | Not yet in English |
Announced on 2 September 2026. Ten go out on 6 October, another six on 27 October, and one is left on 3 November. None of these is in English yet and most never will be, which is the ordinary condition of French fiction. 9
Everything about this prize is strange, and all of it is on purpose.
Edmond de Goncourt signed his will on 16 November 1884 and left his estate to found a literary society of ten writers — politicians and aristocrats explicitly excluded — each drawing an annuity, and awarding an annual prize of five thousand francs. He died in 1896, his cousins contested the will for three years and lost, and the society was recognised in law in January 1903. 2
The first prize was handed over at ten at night on 21 December 1903, to John-Antoine Nau, a former sailor born in San Francisco, for Force ennemie. Three journalists turned up. It was not at Drouant — the Ten only moved there in October 1914, and have met in the same oval room upstairs ever since. 34
The Académie says it plainly on its own site: the winner receives a cheque for ten euros. It is the five thousand francs of 1903 after a century of inflation, and nobody has ever bothered to round it up. Winners are widely reported to frame it rather than cash it. 1
What it is worth instead is readers. L’Anomalie won in 2020 and reached a million copies in print inside a year. Houris won in 2024 and passed 450,000 hardbacks in France within twelve months. No English-language prize moves books on that scale. 1011
You may win the Goncourt once. Romain Gary won it in 1956 for Les Racines du ciel. In 1975 it went to La Vie devant soi by Émile Ajar, a novelist who did not exist: Gary had invented him and sent his cousin’s son Paul Pavlowitch out to be him in public. The Ten voted without knowing.
Gary, through Ajar, declined the prize; the Académie said it had voted for the book and the award stood. He shot himself in December 1980, having left Robert Gallimard a manuscript called Vie et mort d’Émile Ajar. It came out in 1981 and ends: I had a good time. Goodbye and thank you. 6
Julien Gracq had published a pamphlet attacking literary prizes and said he would turn the Goncourt down. On 3 December 1951 the Ten gave it to him anyway, first ballot, for Le Rivage des Syrtes, on the grounds that they vote for the book and not the author. He refused it. The print run went from 7,000 to 127,000. 7
In 1932 the prize went to Guy Mazeline’s Les Loups over Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, which is the miss everyone still brings up. In 1921 it went to Batouala by René Maran, the first Black winner, and the book was banned across the French colonies. In 2021 a juror voted for her own partner, the Académie denied there was a problem, and then changed its rules to bar partners and family. 5
The Académie also awards prizes for a first novel, a short story, poetry and biography, announced together each spring. The Goncourt des Lycéens is the famous one and is not theirs: it was set up in 1988 by Fnac and the education ministry under the Académie’s patronage. Each September the Ten hand over a list of about fifteen novels, and roughly two thousand school students across some fifty schools read them and pick their own winner. It is frequently a different book, and often the better guess. 12
Where to go next on this site:
Ten euros. The Académie Goncourt says so on its own site: the winner receives a cheque for 10 euros. It began in 1903 as 5,000 francs from Edmond de Goncourt’s estate and a century of inflation did the rest. What the prize is actually worth is sales: L’Anomalie by Hervé Le Tellier, which won in 2020, reached a million copies in print within a year, and Kamel Daoud’s Houris had passed 450,000 hardbacks in France a year after winning.
On 3 November 2026, at the restaurant Drouant in Paris, at the end of the Académie’s November lunch. The first selection of sixteen novels came out on 2 September 2026, a second selection follows on 6 October, and the four finalists are named on 27 October.
No, and one man did anyway. Romain Gary won in 1956 for Les Racines du ciel. In 1975 the prize went to La Vie devant soi by Émile Ajar, who did not exist: Gary had invented him and had his cousin’s son Paul Pavlowitch play him in public. The Académie voted without knowing. Gary died in 1980 and the confession was published in 1981, ending: I had a good time. Goodbye and thank you.
Julien Gracq tried, in 1951. He had already published a pamphlet attacking literary prizes and said he would turn it down, and the Académie gave him Le Rivage des Syrtes anyway, on the grounds that it votes for the book rather than the author. He refused it, the award stood, and the print run went from 7,000 to 127,000 copies.
Twenty-two of the twenty-six winners from 2000 to 2025. Four are not available: Trois jours chez ma mère by François Weyergans from 2005 and Alabama Song by Gilles Leroy from 2007, for which no English edition could be traced at all, and the two most recent winners, Houris by Kamel Daoud and La Maison vide by Laurent Mauvignier, which are simply not translated yet. The full list with translators is on this page.
Ten writers, known as les Dix. They meet on the first Tuesday of most months in the oval salon on the upper floor of the restaurant Drouant on the place Gaillon in Paris, and have done since 1914. Voting is oral. Each new member inherits the fork and knife of the member they replace, with their own name engraved on them. The president since 2024 is Philippe Claudel.
For the second volume of it, not for the whole thing. The 1919 prize went to À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, published in English as Within a Budding Grove and later as In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. There was a public row about it, because the book it beat was a war novel and Proust was forty-eight in a year when France wanted to hear from its soldiers.
A separate prize, and not one the Académie awards. It was set up in 1988 by Fnac and the French education ministry under the Académie’s patronage. Every September the Académie hands over a list of about fifteen novels and roughly two thousand secondary school students across around fifty schools read them and pick their own winner, which is often a different book.
The Goncourt is for a book written in French, awarded by ten writers who hold the seats for life, and pays ten euros. The Booker is for a novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, judged by a panel that changes every year, and pays 50,000 pounds. The Goncourt is older by sixty-six years, and its effect on sales in France is larger than the Booker’s in Britain.
Facts last checked 14 September 2026. Every English edition named on this page was checked against a publisher or a library catalogue rather than inferred from the French title, and where nothing could be traced the entry says so instead of guessing. Three things I have deliberately left out. The story that winners never cash the ten-euro cheque is repeated everywhere but I could not find the Académie saying it, so the page calls it widely reported. The often-quoted average of 577,000 copies for a Goncourt winner comes from an analysis with no named data source, so the page uses two figures from the trade press instead. And for Les Mandarins and Les Racines du ciel the translators are confirmed but the first English publishers are not, so they are not named.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and I read every one of them in translation.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“A cheque for ten euros, and half a million readers.”
— What the Goncourt is actually paying you in.
Twenty-two translated winners is a year of reading if you are quick. The newsletter goes out once a month with rather less than that, and only what is worth the time.
Get book recommendations Browse the full bookshelf