©️The world
Paris, 4 November 2025.- The French writer Laurent Mauvignier has just been the winner of the Prix Goncourt 2025 for his novel La Maison empire (Éditions de Minuit), this Tuesday, November 4, 2025. Two months earlier, the same book had already won the Le Monde Literary Prize. A double consecration for an author who, for twenty-five years, has built a demanding work on memory, shame and transmission.
In the famous Drouant restaurant in Paris, France, the Goncourt Academy awarded its prestigious prize to Laurent Mauvignier for La Maison Empire. A vast and silent novel, crossed by family shadows and buried secrets. This award crowns an exceptional year: on September 3, Mauvignier had already won the Le Monde Literary Prize, awarded on the Cordeliers campus in Paris. Two major awards, two months apart, for the same book: a rare event in French literary history.
A novel of memory and silence
The empty house tells the story of a house abandoned for twenty years, reopened by the narrator's father. In this frozen house, each object a piano, a medal, a carved photo becomes a witness of the past. Through four generations, Mauvignier explores the shames, secrets, filiation and weight of silence. Writing, dense and immersive, plunges the reader into collective memory, where the intimate joins history.
Since his debut at the Midnight Editions, Mauvignier has established himself as one of the most powerful novelists of his generation. His long style breaths, attention to the unsaid, looking at pain and dignity he compared to Claude Simon or Faulkner. With La Maison empty, he signed his tenth novel and, according to the jury of the World, reached the top of his art. For the Goncourt jury, chaired by Didier Decoin, the text is a work of rare intensity, where literature confronts memory as a broken mirror.
Before this double victory in 2025, Mauvignier had already received: the Fénéon Prize (2000) for Loin d'eux, the Wepler Prize and the Inter Book Prize (2001) for Learning to Finish, the Fnac Prize (2006) for In the crowd, the Prix des Libraires (2010) for Men. But the Goncourt, often regarded as the grail of French letters, definitely devotes a writer's journey both discreet, deep and constant.
The Prix Le Monde, awarded on September 3, 2025, had already highlighted the power of the novel, welcoming a family fresco inhabited by memory and shame. The Goncourt Prize, on the other hand, expands international recognition: foreign publishing houses have already acquired translation rights, and sales now exceed 200,000 copies in France.
Laurent Mauvignier today enters the small circle of the great French writers consecrated by the Goncourt. With The Empty House, he signs a monumental work on transmission and silence, where each page seems to search the human soul. Two major awards for the same novel: 2025 will remain like Mauvignier, the year in which French literature celebrated, through it, the power of memory and speech.
R.J. With The world
