A Book Prize From Those Behind Bars: Goncourt des détenus
As always, I’m spending too much brain space on this notion of celebrities becoming book pushers. So this NYT article from a couple of weeks ago was a nice change-up. The Prix Goncourt is France’s version of the Booker or the Pulitzer, but in some ways it might be more akin to being bestowed the Oprah stamp of approval: The monetary prize is only €10, but the payoff in book sales is considerable.
Recently, France’s most prestigious literary award (which already has a bunch of tentacles with different awards for poetry, biography, etc.) started something called Goncourt des détenus, or “inmates’ Goncourt.” From this article in the NYT: “Some prisons have organized their own literary prizes, but the inmates’ Goncourt is unprecedented in size and reach, with about 500 people detained in 31 prisons taking part. It is also prominently backed by the French government, which is often under fire from the right for being too lenient with convicts and from the left for incarcerating too many people in run-down facilities. The Goncourt project, however, has faced little criticism — a sign of literature’s sacred place in French culture and of the belief in its life-changing virtues.”
For this nascent prize, the judges (i.e. inmates) chose the novel Sa Préférée (“His Favorite”) by Sarah Jollien-Fardel.
Everyone brings something unique to an interpretation of a book. Is Jenna Bush Hager (just as an example since there has been so much current news coverage about how *she* is the new publishing mover-and-shaker [but what about Reese??]) going to recommend a book for the same reasons that an incarcerated person is? The big picture, according to Odile Macchi with the International Observatory of Prisons in France, is “To realize that, yes, these are actually people who have something to say about literature.”
Inmates’ access to books — as well as the necessary group discussion in order to pick a winner — is “a civic issue.” At least in France, where President Emmanuel Macron has named reading as one of his “great causes,” people do believe that literature can play a role in understanding one’s life.
Parting Q: Who do you trust for book recommendations — and why?
originally published on instagram