Women’s representation in French literary prizes, Digi Mart USA News (France): According to the Equality Observatory of the French Ministry of Culture, only about 16% of the major literary prizes awarded since the beginning of the 20th century have gone to women. The imbalance has long drawn criticism, and the publisher’s article traces how the major prizes have treated female authors over time.
In 1904, a group of journalists from the magazine La Vie heureuse protested the sexism of the Prix Goncourt. That year the prize went to Léon Frapié for La Maternelle.
In response, a women’s prize, the Prix Femina, was created under the impetus of Anna de Noailles. The Goncourt jury did not award a woman until 1945, when Elsa Triolet was honored, roughly forty years later.
Myriam Harry came close to a historic breakthrough in 1903, when the ten-member Goncourt jury remained split evenly at five votes for each of the two finalists across three rounds of voting. The Femina jury, which is entirely female, has not reversed the imbalance.
Since its creation, the Femina has been awarded 47 times to women and 70 times to men, and the prize was suspended during both world wars.
Since 2000, the trend has shifted toward parity. The Femina’s literature prize now stands at about 40% women, and the figure rises to about 43% when the Femina’s foreign literature, essay and high school prizes are included.
The high school jury has rewarded women 60% of the time, though even that support has not produced full parity. The Goncourt des lycéens has honored 19 women and 19 men since 1988.
The Goncourt itself has honored only 13 women since 1903, about 15%, with a long gap between 1998, when Paule Constant was honored, and 2009, when Marie NDiaye was honored. The Académie française has given its Grand Prix to 15 women out of 116 laureates since 1914, and the Renaudot has honored about 18% women, with improvement since the early 2000s.
The Médicis has honored 18 women, or about 22%, since 1958. The L’Interallié has honored only 10 laureates in a century.
A 2016 article in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps described the typical laureate of the major French literary prizes as a 42-year-old man published by Gallimard. This year, for the prizes already announced (Goncourt, Femina, Renaudot, Médicis), the typical laureate is still a man, with an average age of 53.
Parity appears only among publishers, with Flammarion and Gallimard.
Anne Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature and a signatory of a Libération op-ed by women authors denouncing sexism in French literary prizes, received the Renaudot in 1984. She is the only author to have won the Renaudot as part of a major prize sweep, despite numerous other distinctions, including the Prix François-Mauriac, the Marguerite-Duras prize and the Prix de la langue française for her body of work.
