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La Lettrine · PrizesThe Prix Femina was created in 1904, one year after the first Goncourt, by a jury of women writers reacting to the exclusively male Académie Goncourt.

Prizes

The Femina Was Founded Because the Goncourt Would Not Have Women

The Prix Femina was created in 1904, one year after the first Goncourt, by a jury of women writers reacting to the exclusively male Académie Goncourt.

A blank white book cover stands upright between two stacks of hardcover books, library shelves behind
The Prix Femina was created in 1904, one year after the first Goncourt, by a jury of women writers reacting to the exclusively male Académie Goncourt.

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A jury of women writers created France's second major literary prize in direct response to the all-male Académie Goncourt ↗ — and in doing so reshaped what prize culture could look like.

A Prize Born from Exclusion

The Prix Goncourt was awarded for the first time in December 1903, its ten jurors drawn entirely from the Parisian literary establishment and entirely male. Within months, a group of women writers and critics connected to the magazine Vie heureuse had organised a counter-institution. The Prix Femina — initially called the Prix Vie heureuse before it took its permanent name in 1904 — was designed from the outset with an all-female jury, a deliberate structural inversion of the Goncourt's composition.

Key dates

  1. 1903First Prix Goncourt awarded, all-male jury
  2. 1904Prix Vie heureuse founded; becomes Prix Femina shortly after
  3. 1919Goncourt awarded to Proust's À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
  4. 1954Goncourt awarded to Simone de Beauvoir, Les Mandarins
  5. 1984Goncourt awarded to Marguerite Duras, L'Amant

The terms were equally pointed in their simplicity. The prize rewards a French-language work of imagination — prose, poetry, or drama — judged according to criteria the jury sets for itself, with no restriction on the nationality of the author. The jury has always remained entirely female, a parity argument made permanent in the rules rather than left to goodwill.

Ornate corner facade with wrought-iron balconies above street signs for Rue Gaillon
The Prix Renaudot — founded in 1926 ↗, named after the seventeenth-century journalist Théophraste Renaudot — is deliberated by its jury in the Drouant building on the same day as the Goncourt and announced an hour after it. The Renaudot Is Announced in the Same Building, an Hour LaterPhoto: P1220155 Paris II restaurant Drouant rwk · Wikimedia Commons

What the Femina Got Right

The prize quickly demonstrated an eye for work that outlasted the season's other verdicts. In 1931 the jury awarded Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Vol de nuit, while in 2001 it recognised Marie NDiaye for Rosie Carpe — decisions that now read less as gambles than as early consensus on canonical texts.

A Gallimard NRF edition face-up on a worn oak table, its cream cover and black type sharp against the warm wood grain, adult hands just visible at the frame edge
The NRF livery — cream paper, a ruled frame, author and title set at the same size. Gallimard settled it in 1911 and has altered only small typographic details since.Photo: Alvessz / Pexels

The prize has also been notably willing to cross linguistic borders: winners have included authors writing in French from Belgium, Quebec, and Switzerland, and the jury has returned repeatedly to writers working at the edge of autofiction and documentary form before those modes became fashionable prize territory.

Prize terms

The Femina never acquired the Goncourt's commercial weight — a Goncourt adds hundreds of thousands of sales overnight — but it has accumulated a different kind of authority: the record of a jury that did not wait to be invited.

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