Literary Prizes, Visibility and the Life of Books
Triste Tigre (Sad Tiger) by Neige Sinno won the Prix Littéraire du Monde, the Prix Les Inrockuptibles, the Prix Femina, the Prix Blù Jean-Marc Roberts, and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2023. It went on to win 21 Goncourt Choices worldwide: in Canada, Turkey, Slovakia, South Korea, Croatia, Ireland, the United States, India, the Netherlands, Austria, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Middle East. Released in English by Seven Stories Press in May 2025, the Indian edition has just come out.
From a writer’s viewpoint, what is your take on the importance and the evolution of literary prizes in the ecosystem today?
Literary prizes are a wonderful way to celebrate books and try to make them central in the cultural scene and the cultural conversation. There are so many prizes that each prize has to create its own personality.
The ecosystem of prizes is like a living organism. Some prizes represent some very strong and dominant species while others are more interested in less known genres or more demanding books. And all the species need each other to survive in a healthy environment. Bolaño compared literature to a forest where the masterpieces were some big trees in the middle, with the rest of the smaller trees that make up the forest. I think that is quite accurate.
In what way you feel the awards have strengthened your bond with the reader, publisher and increased the discoverability of your book?
The prizes definitely give books a lot of visibility. In the particular case of Sad Tiger, which is a memoir about child sexual abuse – a genre that lots of people are afraid of reading – the prizes gave the book some sort of aura which made it less scary. The prizes gave the book an image of respectability.Especially the Goncourt des lycéens prize, which is awarded by a jury of hundreds of high school students (17-18 years old), gave the book a different image. I suppose lots of people thought: if an eighteen year old can read that book it should not be that shocking.
But there were other factors that made the book a success, especially the good press it got and the work of booksellers who supported the book. Lots of readers reported to me that they were not sure of reading the book and were convinced to do so by a bookseller who had read it.
Neige Sinno is a French writer born in 1977 in the Hautes-Alpes region of France and currently based in the French Basque country, after spending several years in Mexico. Trained in contemporary North American literature, she is the author of La vie des rats (2007) and Le Camion (2018). Her acclaimed book Triste Tigre (Sad Tiger), published in 2023, has won multiple major literary awards including the Prix Femina 2023, the Le Monde Literary Prize 2023, the 2024 Strega European Prize, the Prix Goncourt des lycéens 2023, and the Choix Goncourt Prize India 2023.Sad Tiger (Seven Stories Press, 2025), translated by Natasha Lehrer, was shortlisted for US National Book Award 2025.
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