SARAN, France — On a recent day near Orléans in the Loire Valley, jurors for France’s most recent literary prize emerged from their cells.
They passed tall fences topped with barbed wire, past metal detectors and security cameras, and entered a classroom with barred windows.
The inmates, more than a dozen men and women confined in the Orléans-Saran Penitentiary Center, had met to discuss the novels published in France in the previous year and choose the one they considered the best.
They were part of the first edition of a new government-sponsored literary prize awarded by prisoners. The prize, called the Goncourt des détenus, or Goncourt of recluses, is the latest of several spinoffs from France’s most prestigious literary prize. Inmates met for three months in the fall to consider the books on Goncourt’s long list of 15 finalists and choose a winner.
The prize was awarded last month in Paris to Sarah Jollien-Fardel for “Sa Préférée,” or “Her Favourite,” about a woman struggling to deal with the legacy of her father’s physical and psychological abuse.
Some prisons have organized their own literary prizes, but the inmates’ Goncourt is unprecedented in size and scope, with some 500 people incarcerated in 31 prisons taking part. It is also backed and promoted by the French government, often criticized by the right for being too lenient with convicts and by the left for imprisoning too many people in dilapidated facilities.
Yet the Goncourt project has faced little criticism—a sign of literature’s sacred place in French culture and of the belief in its life-changing virtues. “Wherever culture, language and words advance, violence recedes,” said Éric Dupond-Moretti, France’s Minister of Justice.
For the inmates near Orléans, the process of reading and debating was just as important as participating in the selection of the winner. Many welcomed the chance to escape the monotony of incarceration.
Of the approximately 850 prisoners incarcerated at Orléans-Saran, 18 participated in the Goncourt workshop.
“The idea was not just to have people who were going to read the 15 books,” said Pascal Rémond, who oversees teaching and education programs at the prison. “The goal was to get people to read.”
Not all inmates were comfortable with the idea of participating in a literary analysis in public. Rémond said one inmate participated on the condition that he did not have to speak. But during one session, that inmate spoke at length about various books, including “Une heure de ferveur” or “An Hour of Fervor,” which he found beautifully written but too difficult to finish. The plot, about a Japanese father separated from his daughter in France, was a painful reminder of his own daughter’s separation from him, he said.
Many hope that the new award will change public perception. “It can change the optics,” said Odile Macchi, head of the research division at the International Prison Observatory in France. “To realize that these are people who have something to say about literature.”
By: AURELIEN BREEDEN
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/books/goncourt-inmates-book-prize-france.html, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-01-05 23:10:07
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