Brigitte Giraud becomes the 13th woman to win Prix Goncourt

Vivre Vite, an autobiographical novel about the death of her husband, wins France’s most prestigious literary award

For only the 13th time in 120 years, France’s oldest and most celebrated literary award the Prix Goncourt was won by a woman on Thursday.

Brigitte Giraud, 56, a French writer of novels and short stories was declared winner with Vivre Vite (Live Fast) after the jury voted 14 times.

After a final vote ended in stalemate, the president of the Goncourt Academy cast a deciding vote, choosing Giraud over her closest rival Giuliano da Empoli.

Vivre Vite is a short autobiographical story in which Giraud recounts the chain of events leading to the death of her husband Claude in a motorbike accident in 1999, leaving her with a young son and a recently signed contract to buy a new family home.

“Accident, move, funeral,” she writes in an account laden with anger and remorse and punctuated by the eternal questions of why, how and what if.

“When no disaster occurs, we move forward without looking back, we stare straight ahead at the horizon. When a tragedy occurs, we turn back, we come back to haunt the place, we proceed to the reconstruction. We want to understand the origin of each gesture, each decision. We rewind a hundred times. You become a specialist in cause and effect. We track down, we dissect, we autopsy. We want to know everything about human nature, the intimate and collective forces that make what happens happen,” Giraud writes.

Da Empoli, 49, had been tipped to win this year’s Goncourt for his book, Le Mage du Kremlin (The Kremlin’s Sorcerer), an account of the last 30 years in Russia under Vladimir Putin, that has sold nearly 100,000 copies since it was published six months ago. Da Empoli won the Grand Prix du Roman, another of France’s prestigious literary prizes earlier this year.

Haitian novelist Makenzy Orcel with Une Somme Humaine (A Human Sum) and Cloé Korman’s Les Presque Soeurs (The Almost Sisters) were also on the four-book shortlist.

In 2007, Giraud, a former journalist, won the Goncort prize for a newcomer for L’Amour est très surestimé (Love is very overestimated).

The Goncourt, France’s oldest and most celebrated literary award, is announced each November after the 10-member Goncourt Academy jury – made up of three women and seven men – enjoy a traditional lunch of lamb stew and olives at the Drouant restaurant near the Opéra Garnier in Paris.

The prize is worth just €10 but guarantees renown and massive book sales. Most winners prefer to frame rather than cash their Goncourt cheque.

Previous winners, who include Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Elsa Triolet, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras, have seen novels rack up sales of 400,000 copies.