2023-11-02 13:00:00
We got a real facelift on October 12 when we saw the second list of the Grand Prix du roman of the French Academy and its three selected authors presenting the famous Galligrasseuil of the 1960s-1990s with Dominique Barbéris (Gallimard), Antoine Sénanque (Grasset) and Sarah Chiche (Seuil). The “good old days”, dominated by these three learned houses and a few price-makers like Yves Berger (Grasset), where we combined positions and functions (juror here, editor there) and multiplied the dearly paid prefaces in order to granting favors to this or that juror, votes that were exchanged if necessary.
If the fights were fierce, it is because winning an autumn grand prize can change the life of an author and give great color to a publishing house. Obviously, the “medals” have a hierarchy, in terms of sales potential that is. Thus, the Goncourt, nicknamed the Grail, sells on average and in large format some 360,000 copies, followed by the Goncourt of high school students (around 315,000), the Renaudot (220,000), the Académie française (120,000) – the last two figures being to be reversed depending on the decades – and Femina (95,000), the Interallié and the Medici closing the ban.
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But then, what about the famous trio today? It seems partly gone. We have indeed had “fun” counting the winners of the autumn grand prizes for ten years. With six trophies in all, and not a single Renaudot, Femina or Académie française prize, the Seuil seems to have largely lost ground. Grasset did much better, with 13 crowns, but did not collect any Goncourt, its strong points remaining the Renaudot and the Académie française. That leaves Gallimard, still in the lead with 16 laurels, but only two Goncourts, a meager haul compared to previous decades, Actes Sud, Albin Michel or even Stock and Flammarion having entered the prize round.
However, the house has just won the Academy’s grand novel prize, awarded to Dominique Barbéris for A Way of Loving, a trophy all the more precious in this year of great editorial upheavals and the movement of authors who, as we know, knows, are irresistibly attracted to priced publishers. And the timpani from Drouant? At the mercy of the unfathomable sovereignty of the jurors…
#famous #Galligrasseuil #Express