Former psychiatrist Lydie Salvayre wins Prix Goncourt

A former psychiatrist has won France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, with her novel centred on the Spanish civil war.

Lydie Salvayre’s book Pas Pleurer (Don’t Cry) saw off competition from, among others, the bestselling French author David Foenkinos, to win the coveted award.

Salvayre, 66, whose parents were exiled republicans who fled Franco’s regime in Spain, grew up near the city of Toulouse in south-west France, speaking Spanish. She learned French after arriving at primary school.

Her previous works have been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for theatre productions.

“I’m very happy and moved,” Salvayre told journalists after being named winner at the Drouant restaurant in Paris, where the annual award ceremony is traditionally held.

Pas Pleurer was selected by the jury in the fifth round of voting by five votes against four for the novel Meursault Contre-enquête (Meursault, Counter-inquiry) by the Algerian columnist and novelist Kamel Daoud, who revisited Albert Camus’s celebrated work L’Étranger (The Outsider).

The novel Charlotte by Foenkinos was favourite to win the Goncourt this year, with Daoud’s work close behind.

Salvayre’s narrative interlaces the voice of her own mother recounting her experiences of the Spanish civil war with that of the rightwing French writer Georges Bernanos and is set in the summer of 1936.

“We wanted to crown a novel of great literary quality and a book of very original writing, even if I regret there was sometimes a little too much Spanish [in it],” Bernard Pivot, the academy president, told journalists.

As with previous winners, Salvayre received a symbolic prize of €10 (£7), but can expect the award to boost sales by at least 400,000 copies.

In 2013, sales of Goncourt winner Pierre Lemaitre’s Au Revoir là-haut jumped from 30,000 to 620,000 according to his publisher, Albin Michel.

The Prix Goncourt is given to the author of the “best and most imaginative prose work of the year”. It is named after Edmond de Goncourt, an author, critic and publisher, who willed that his estate be used to found the Académie Goncourt to present the annual award.

Previous winners have included Marcel Proust for volume two of In Search of Lost Time, Simone de Beauvoir for The Mandarins, André Malraux for Man’s Fate, Marguerite Duras for The Lover, Jonathan Littell for The Kindly Ones, and Michel Houellebecq for The Map and the Territory.

The first winner in 1903 was John-Antoine Nau, for his book Force Ennemie (Enemy Force), which was only translated into English in 2010.