The Goncourt Prize is only ten euros, but it usually means a huge economic win. If everything follows the pattern, this year's recipient of France's finest literary prize, Kamel Daoud, can expect to sell 577,000 copies of the now prize-winning novel "Houris" this year alone.
The figure is an average of the sales of Goncourt Prize-winning works from 2019 to 2023, according to figures from the market research institute GfK, published in Le Monde.
However, historically, there are examples of prize winners whose books have sold both much more and much less. Marguerite Duras' "The Lover" sold 1.6 million copies after the Goncourt Prize in 1984, while "Les Omres errantes" by Pascal Quignard, the prize winner in 2002, only reached a sales volume of 100,000 copies.
