France awards literary prizes

France’s most prestigious literary award, the Goncourt Prize, went this week to Laurent Gaude for his novel “Le Soleil des Scorta” (The Sun of the Scortas). It tells the story of the Scorta family from 1870 to the present, its struggle against poverty and the family’s vow to pass on to each generation an inheritance -- be it a souvenir or a secret.

The second-most prestigious literary award, the Renaudot Prize, went to the late Irene Nemirovsky for “Suite Francaise” (French Suite), a more than 60-year-old manuscript turned over to a publisher just months ago.

Nemirovsky, a Ukrainian Jew who went into exile in France, was a noted novelist between the two world wars. She was arrested in Paris in 1942 by the Nazis, deported and killed in Auschwitz without having finished her novel, which described cowardice and small gestures of solidarity by the French at the start of the occupation.

Nemirovsky’s daughter, Denise Epstein, had kept the manuscript and only sent it to the Denoel publishing house earlier this year.