All prizes France
France · Since 1903 · For books in French
Awarded each autumn in Paris by the ten members of the Académie Goncourt to a work of imaginative prose written in French, by an author of any nationality.
Edmond de Goncourt left his estate to found the Académie Goncourt, which first awarded the prize in 1903. Its ten members are co-opted, serve for life and have met at the Drouant restaurant in Paris since 1914. Publishers send eligible novels to every member by early September. Between September and late October the Académie names three selections of 15, 8 and 4 books, and it picks the winner in early November by oral vote, in up to 14 rounds. The winner receives a symbolic cheque for 10 euros, but the prize brings large print runs and sales. An author can normally win only once; Romain Gary won a second time in 1975 under the name Émile Ajar. Winners include Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras. Since 2008 jurors may not be employed by a publisher.
Goncourt 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Beautiful Dark”
Caroline Lamarche · 70 when first published
Novel · 229 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:While trying to trace an ancestor banished by his family, a woman goes back over her own life, including the day her husband, her first great love, told her he was gay.
Goncourt 2025 · Shortlist
Kolkhoze
Emmanuel Carrère · 68 when first published
Nonfiction · 416 pages · Family, Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:After his mother’s state funeral, a writer retraces four generations of his family: his father, a young bourgeois from Bordeaux, and his mother, a stateless émigrée who became France’s leading expert on Russia.
Goncourt 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Night in the Heart”
Nathacha Appanah · 52 when first published
Novel · 282 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Three stories of women attacked by the men who shared their lives are woven together. The first is the narrator’s own, from the night she ran at twenty-five; she is the only one of the three still alive.
Goncourt 2024 · Shortlist
Jacaranda
Gaël Faye · 42 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Family, War
AI-generated summary:Milan spends years trying to learn what lies hidden in the shade of the jacaranda tree loved by his friend Stella, in a Rwanda left silent after the genocide against the Tutsi.
Goncourt 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Archipelagos”
Hélène Gaudy · 45 when first published
Novel · 285 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A writer sets out to give her father back his memories. A quiet man who says he remembers nothing, he has filled his workshop with curiosities, and she begins her search there.
Goncourt 2024 · Shortlist
Madelaine avant l'aube
Sandrine Collette · 54 when first published
Novel · 247 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In a tiny hamlet where families have always worked land owned by others, a starving, untamed girl comes out of the forest one day and is taken in by the villagers.
Goncourt 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sarah, Susanne and the Writer”
Éric Reinhardt · 58 when first published
Novel · 419 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:Sarah has given her life story to a writer she admires. In his novel she becomes Susanne, a woman who no longer feels loved and discovers that her husband owns three quarters of their home.
Goncourt 2023 · Shortlist
Gaspard Koenig · 41 when first published
Novel · 379 pages · Nature, Politics
AI-generated summary:Two agronomy students, anxious about the ecological crisis, set out to change the world: Kevin, son of farm workers, starts a worm-composting company, while Arthur tries to revive his family’s pesticide-ruined field.
Goncourt 2023 · Shortlist
Triste tigre
Neige Sinno · 46 when first published
Nonfiction · 288 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:A writer recounts how her stepfather raped her from the age of seven to fourteen, in a family living on the margins in the Alps in the 1990s, and asks whether such things can be told at all.
Also: National Book Award 2025 finalist
Goncourt 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Almost Sisters”
Cloé Korman · 39 when first published
Novel · 251 pages · Historical, War, Family
AI-generated summary:A writer searches for traces of six Jewish girls, three of them her father’s cousins, who were moved between internment camps and children’s homes in France after their parents were deported.
Goncourt 2022 · Shortlist
Le Mage du Kremlin
Giuliano da Empoli · 49 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:One night Vadim Baranov, a former theatre director and reality-TV producer who became the éminence grise of the Russian leader known as the Tsar, tells his story to the narrator.
Goncourt 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Human Sum”
Makenzy Orcel · 39 when first published
Novel · 621 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:From beyond the grave, a woman tells her life: a neglected childhood in a provincial village full of gossip, then her escape to Paris, her studies at the Sorbonne and a love affair.
Goncourt 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Journey East”
Christine Angot · 62 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:A girl meets the father who left her mother before she was born, and from the age of thirteen he abuses her. The story follows her as a child, a teenager and a young woman.
Goncourt 2021 · Shortlist
Milwaukee Blues
Louis-Philippe Dalembert · 59 when first published
Novel · 260 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:After a Black man is killed by a police officer in Milwaukee, those who knew him, from his primary school teacher to his college coach, recall Emmett, a boy from the ghetto once headed for football stardom.
Goncourt 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Son of a Bastard”
Sorj Chalandon · 69 when first published
Novel · 329 pages · War, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A journalist covering the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon learns that the court file on his own father, who claimed to have fought in the Resistance, lies in the archives of the Nord.
Goncourt 2020 · Shortlist
Thésée, sa vie nouvelle
Camille de Toledo · 44 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In 2012 Theseus leaves “the city of the West” with his children and three boxes of archives, taking the last night train east to escape the memory of his family.
Goncourt 2020 · Shortlist
Les Impatientes
Djaïli Amadou Amal · 45 when first published
Novel · 176 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In the Sahel, young Ramla is torn from the man she loves and married to Safira’s husband, while her sister Hindou is forced to marry their cousin. All they are ever told is to be patient.
Goncourt 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Historiographer of the Kingdom”
Maël Renouard · 41 when first published
Novel · 329 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Placed at fifteen in the same class as the eldest prince at Morocco’s Royal College, a man finds himself in the circle of the future King Hassan II, by turns exiled and favoured.
Goncourt 2019 · Shortlist
Soif
Amélie Nothomb · 53 when first published
Novel · 96 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In the hours before his crucifixion, Jesus himself tells his Passion and reflects on what it means to be human and to live in a body.
Goncourt 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Son’s Share”
Jean-Luc Coatalem · 60 when first published
Novel · 261 pages · Family, War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In September 1943 a former colonial officer is arrested by the Gestapo in a village in Finistère on the strength of a letter of denunciation. Decades later, his grandson sets out to find him.
Goncourt 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Outside World”
Olivier Rolin · 72 when first published
Nonfiction · 301 pages
AI-generated summary:A writer travels back through a lifetime of journeys, letting memory wander from place to place, face to face and book to book to draw a personal atlas of the world.
Goncourt 2018 · Shortlist
Frère d'âme
David Diop · 52 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:On a morning in the First World War, Senegalese infantryman Alfa Ndiaye sees his childhood friend Mademba, closer than a brother, fall mortally wounded a few metres from their trench.
Also: International Booker 2021 winner
Goncourt 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Masters and Slaves”
Paul Greveillac · 37 when first published
Novel · 457 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Kewei, born in 1950 to a peasant family in Sichuan, draws from morning till night. Spotted by a Red Guard, he leaves for the Beijing art academy and rises to become a painter of the regime.
Goncourt 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Winter of Discontent”
Thomas B. Reverdy · 44 when first published
Novel · 219 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:In London during the strikes of the winter of 1978–79, young bicycle courier Candice rehearses the part of Richard III in an all-female production.
Goncourt 2017 · Shortlist
L'Art de perdre
Alice Zeniter · 31 when first published
Novel · 400 pages · Family, Migration, Historical
AI-generated summary:Naïma, whose family comes from Algeria, sets out to learn the history her family never told her: why her grandfather Ali became a harki, and what her father lost when he came to France in 1962.
Also: Warwick Prize 2021 shortlist
Goncourt 2017 · Shortlist
Bakhita
Véronique Olmi · 55 when first published
Novel · 384 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Kidnapped at the age of seven from her village in Darfur, a girl endures the horrors of slavery until, as a teenager, she is bought by the Italian consul.
Goncourt 2017 · Shortlist
Tiens ferme ta couronne
Yannick Haenel · 50 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:A man has written a vast screenplay about Herman Melville that no producer wants. One day he obtains the phone number of the great American director Michael Cimino, who agrees to read it.
Goncourt 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Other One We Adored”
Catherine Cusset · 53 when first published
Novel · 290 pages · Autofiction, Love
AI-generated summary:The narrator brings back to life Thomas, a man of exuberant vitality who was first her lover and then a close friend, and who took his own life in the United States at thirty-nine.
Goncourt 2016 · Shortlist
Petit Pays
Gaël Faye · 34 when first published
Novel · 192 pages · Coming of age, War
AI-generated summary:In 1992 ten-year-old Gabriel lives in a comfortable expatriate neighbourhood of Burundi with his French father, his Rwandan mother and his little sister, until history overtakes their small country.
Goncourt 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Cannibals”
Régis Jauffret · 61 when first published
Novel · 185 pages · Love, Crime
AI-generated summary:Noémie, a twenty-four-year-old painter, writes to the mother of the architect she has just left to apologise for breaking up with him. A correspondence begins between the two women.
Goncourt 2015 · Shortlist
Les Prépondérants
Hédi Kaddour · 70 when first published
Novel · 344 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In spring 1922 a Hollywood crew arrives to shoot a film in Nahbès, a small town in the Maghreb, sharpening the conflicts between local notables, French settlers and young nationalists.
Goncourt 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Titus Did Not Love Berenice”
Nathalie Azoulai · 49 when first published
Novel · 314 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Left by her lover Titus in a café, a modern-day Bérénice sets out to read all of Racine and understand the man who wrote the story of a Roman emperor leaving the queen he loves.
Goncourt 2015 · Shortlist
Ce pays qui te ressemble
Tobie Nathan · 67 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In the Jewish ghetto of Cairo, against all odds, rebellious Zohar is born to a flamboyant young mother and a blind father; his milk sister Masreya, a dancer from the Delta, will lead him to the gates of power.
Goncourt 2014 · Shortlist
Charlotte
David Foenkinos · 40 when first published
Novel · 217 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:The life of Charlotte Salomon, a painter who grew up in Berlin, was gradually shut out of German society by the Nazis and fled to France, where she began an autobiographical body of paintings.
Goncourt 2014 · Shortlist
Meursault, contre-enquête
Kamel Daoud · 44 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Seventy years after the killing on the beach told in a famous twentieth-century novel, the brother of “the Arab” shot by Meursault gives the victim back his name, Moussa, and his story.
Goncourt 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“These Things Happen”
Pauline Dreyfus · 45 when first published
Novel · 228 pages · Historical, War, Family
AI-generated summary:In 1945 all of Parisian high society gathers to bury the elegant Duchess of Sorrente, who went through the war in a very strange way and carried a secret within her.
Goncourt 2013 · Shortlist
Frédéric Verger · 54 when first published
Novel · 477 pages · War, Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:In Marsovia, an imaginary principality of central Europe, during the Second World War, a hotel manager and a Jewish widower have been writing operettas together since 1917 as the Nazi threat closes in.
Goncourt 2013 · Shortlist
Nue
Jean-Philippe Toussaint · 56 when first published
Novel · 124 pages · Love · Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte, book 4
AI-generated summary:Marie, a haute couture designer and the narrator’s partner, closes her autumn-winter show with a model dressed only in honey, followed down the runway by a swarm of bees.
Goncourt 2013 · Shortlist
L'Invention de nos vies
Karine Tuil · 41 when first published
Novel · 399 pages · Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:Sam Tahar, a star lawyer in New York, built his success on a lie: he took the Jewish background of his best friend Samuel, a failed writer stuck in a tense French suburb. Twenty years on, they meet again.
Goncourt 2012 · Shortlist
La Vérité sur l'affaire Harry Quebert
Joël Dicker · 27 when first published
Novel · 656 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:In 2008 a young New York novelist with writer’s block learns that his mentor, the famous writer Harry Quebert, is accused of murdering a fifteen-year-old girl in New Hampshire in 1975.
Goncourt 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Groundswell”
Linda Lê · 49 when first published
Novel · 276 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:From his grave in Bobigny, a man who has just died recalls, with irony rather than grief, the last year of his life in exile in France; his wife, his daughter and a mysterious Eurasian woman tell their sides too.
Goncourt 2012 · Shortlist
Peste & Choléra
Patrick Deville · 55 when first published
Novel · 292 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The life of Alexandre Yersin, a Swiss-born disciple of Louis Pasteur who spent most of his life in Indochina, where he discovered the plague bacillus and pursued every kind of research.
Goncourt 2011 · Shortlist
Du domaine des Murmures
Carole Martinez · 45 when first published
Novel · 192 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:On her wedding day in 1187, young Esclarmonde refuses to say yes, determined to give herself to God against her father’s wishes, and is walled into a cell beside the castle chapel.
Goncourt 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Beautiful Human Love”
Lyonel Trouillot · 55 when first published
Novel · 169 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Driven by her guide Thomas, a young Western woman travels to a small fishing village on the coast of Haiti, hoping to find traces of a father she barely knew and solve an old family mystery.
Goncourt 2011 · Shortlist
Retour à Killybegs
Sorj Chalandon · 59 when first published
Novel · 276 pages · Politics, War
AI-generated summary:In Killybegs at Christmas 2006, Tyrone Meehan, an IRA veteran whose betrayal has just been exposed, decides to tell the truth about how he became a traitor before others tell it for him.
Goncourt 2010 · Shortlist
Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants
Mathias Énard · 38 when first published
Novel · 144 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:On 13 May 1506 Michelangelo lands in Constantinople, defying Pope Julius II, to answer the sultan’s invitation to design a bridge over the Golden Horn.
Goncourt 2010 · Shortlist
Naissance d'un pont
Maylis de Kerangal · 43 when first published
Novel · 249 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:The building of a suspension bridge somewhere in an imaginary California, told through the lives of a dozen men and women who work on the gigantic site.
Goncourt 2010 · Shortlist
Apocalypse bébé
Virginie Despentes · 41 when first published
Novel · 342 pages · Crime, Satire
AI-generated summary:Valentine, a lost teenager, has disappeared. Between Paris and Barcelona, the people who knew her cross paths, and it is not clear who is really looking for her.
Goncourt 2009 · Shortlist
Les Heures souterraines
Delphine de Vigan · 43 when first published
Novel · 299 pages
AI-generated summary:Mathilde and Thibault do not know each other. Two figures among millions in a city in constant motion, on one day in May they might meet, collide or simply pass each other by.
Goncourt 2009 · Shortlist
La Vérité sur Marie
Jean-Philippe Toussaint · 52 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Love · Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte, book 3
AI-generated summary:A couple has been apart for some months. Although both have new lives, each keeps the memories of the past and imagines the other in their own daily life and new encounters.
Goncourt 2009 · Shortlist
Des hommes
Laurent Mauvignier · 42 when first published
Novel · 242 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Called up to fight in Algeria in 1960, Bernard, Février, Rabut and others came home two years later and kept silent. Forty years on, a birthday and a small gift bring the past back.
Goncourt 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Libertine Education”
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo · 27 when first published
Novel · 434 pages · Coming of age, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1760 young Gaspard leaves Quimper for Paris, where he wanders from the bustle of the river port to the refined salons and the brothels of the lower city.
Goncourt 2008 · Shortlist
Là où les tigres sont chez eux
Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès · 54 when first published
Novel · 750 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Eléazard von Wogau, a press correspondent in the far north-east of Brazil, is given the manuscript of an unpublished biography of the Baroque Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher.
Goncourt 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Beauty of the World”
Michel Le Bris · 64 when first published
Novel · 678 pages · Historical, Nature
AI-generated summary:In 1938 Winnie, a young writer, is asked to write the biography of Osa Johnson, who with her husband Martin was the great star of adventure films in the 1920s and is now a widow lost in drink.
Goncourt 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Passion According to Juette”
Clara Dupont-Monod · 34 when first published
Novel · 232 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The life of Juette, born in 1158 in what is now Belgium: widowed at eighteen, a figure of courage and defiance, she withdraws into silence and seclusion as the first Cathar heresies rise.
Goncourt 2007 · Shortlist
Le Canapé rouge
Michèle Lesbre · 68 when first published
Novel · 118 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Without news of Gyl, a man she once loved, the narrator sets off after him on the Trans-Siberian, her thoughts returning to an old woman waiting for her on a red sofa in Paris.
Goncourt 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sheltered from Nothing”
Olivier Adam · 33 when first published
Novel · 218 pages · Migration, Family
AI-generated summary:Marie feels lost; her husband and children are her last link to life. Then she meets the refugees whom nobody cares about, wandering on the edge of town, and decides to help them.
Goncourt 2007 · Shortlist
Le Rapport de Brodeck
Philippe Claudel · 45 when first published
Novel · 313 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:Back in his village after surviving a camp, Brodeck witnesses the villagers’ killing of a stranger, the Anderer, and is asked to write a report on what happened and why.
Goncourt 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Lover in Short Trousers”
Alain Fleischer · 62 when first published
Novel · 612 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction, Love
AI-generated summary:In London in July 1957, a thirteen-year-old French boy staying with an English family to learn the language has his first love affair, with a young woman seven years older.
Goncourt 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“West”
François Vallejo · 46 when first published
Novel · 266 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In the mid-nineteenth century, after the death of his old master, the Baron de l’Aubépine, a gamekeeper finds the baron’s son taking his place, and the two men can never get along.
Goncourt 2006 · Shortlist
Marilyn dernières séances
Michel Schneider · 62 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The thirty months of analysis between Marilyn Monroe and her last psychoanalyst, Ralph Greenson, a famous Hollywood therapist, drawn from testimony and real events.
Goncourt 2005 · Shortlist
Fuir
Jean-Philippe Toussaint · 48 when first published
Novel · 156 pages · Love · Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte, book 2
AI-generated summary:Given a mobile phone on the day he arrives in China, the narrator wonders whether he is being watched; on a night train between Shanghai and Beijing, his fear of the telephone takes on its full meaning.
Goncourt 2005 · Shortlist
La Possibilité d'une île
Michel Houellebecq · 49 when first published
Novel · 345 pages · Speculative, Satire
AI-generated summary:In a future where a sect promising immortality has replaced the old religions, its members leave their DNA and a life story before dying, to be cloned again every fifty years.
Goncourt 2005 · Shortlist
Falaises
Olivier Adam · 31 when first published
Novel · 147 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:On a hotel balcony in Étretat, a man looks out at the cliffs from which his mother threw herself twenty years earlier and, over one night, searches his memory for her.
Goncourt 2004 · Shortlist
Alain Jaubert · 64 when first published
Novel · 435 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:At the end of the 1950s, a young sailor barely out of a dreamy adolescence puts in at Valparaíso, the legendary port near Cape Horn, a city of stairways, alleys and seedy brothels.
Goncourt 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Liars”
Marc Lambron · 47 when first published
Novel · 333 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Karine, Pierre and Claire, classmates in 1975 in a preparatory class at a Lyon lycée, meet again thirty years later and retell their lives in interwoven, ironic accounts.
Goncourt 2001 · Shortlist
La Reprise
Alain Robbe-Grillet · 79 when first published
Novel · 178 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:HR, a minor agent of a French intelligence and special operations service, arrives in Berlin in 1949 on a mission whose true meaning has not been revealed to him.
Goncourt 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Strangers in the Night”
Marc Lambron · 44 when first published
Novel · 358 pages · Love, Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Rome, 1960. In the world of the Dolce Vita, reporter Jacques Carrère falls madly in love with Tina White, a blonde American beauty, who vanishes as suddenly as she appeared.
Goncourt 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Interpretation of Apes”
Michel Braudeau · 55 when first published
Novel · 680 pages · Love, Crime
AI-generated summary:At eighteen, Hermione and Damien only want to love each other, but Damien has a gift and a secret bond with Professor Sarastre, whose clinic not everyone seems to leave.
Goncourt 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Short Sentences, My Darling”
Pierrette Fleutiaux · 60 when first published
Novel · 222 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In a retirement home, a daughter and her dying mother, sometimes together and sometimes against each other, cross the passage from life to death.