Mokhtar Amoudi wins the Goncourt Prize for prisoners

It is the complicated story of ten-year-old Skander, who goes to live with a foster family with the formidable Madame Khadija, in Courseine, in the Paris suburbs. Placed in child welfare from a very young age, he is nevertheless a boy who is curious about everything and passionate about reading. At college, he enjoys the company of young people from the “Grand Quartier”, who “abolish his moral compass”. Like many kids left to their own devices, the street becomes his kingdom, and takes him further away from his childhood dreams: to become a business lawyer... Failing at school, he grew up in the street, with its rules, its petty trafficking and its violence. This is the plot of Ideal Conditions, Mokhtar Amoudi's first novel, published at the end of August by Gallimard, during this literary season. The book received a lot of attention from the moment it was published. The Goncourt and Renaudot juries placed it in their selections.

The author, born in 1988, has already received the Envoyé par la Poste 2023 Prize, not to mention great reviews. Added to the book is a legend that Mokhtar Amoudi told us: he was in a café with two of his friends and he was talking about his manuscript with his usual verve (you have to hear it, he's a good customer). A few meters from his table was the editor Karina Hocine, General Secretary Editor of Gallimard, who hears everything. She smells a great story, gives her business card to Mokhtar Amoudi and offers to send him her manuscript when it is finished. A little over a year later, Amoudi sent Les Conditions Ideales to Gallimard. We know the rest.

This Thursday, December 14, he has just received the Goncourt Prize from prisoners. Quite a recognition.

Without doubt, the jurors fell under the spell of writing that engages its reader. Just an excerpt: “In a few quarters I had turned around. The French avoided me, warned by their parents of the risks of bad influence they ran by being around me. Worse, my school reports, a very dark shadow, described me as decadent and insolent. Becoming unfit to represent my class, I let the teachers finish me off during the last council of the year. My academic peak was compared to the Renaissance; a good memory that would never come back. » These words paint the portrait of little Skander, too mature for his age. You also have to see his mother: a completely unbalanced, disreputable character. Early on, Skander states: “I don’t like living, I wanted to break my head. This was my first non-academic emotion. I had convinced myself; I was bad and useless to everyone since in times of peace, you don't abandon your child. I was cursed at birth.”

And since Goncourt is about inmates, the novel often refers to the prison. Just an example: “So that was Fleury, a prison. With such a pretty name, I imagined a city by the sea, in Normandy for example. Rather than Fleury, they should have called it Prison, Prison-la-ville. At least we would be fixed.”

There are at least two essential reasons why The Ideal Conditions was noticed: its style – Amoudi has a lovely pen –, and the tone, this light, often funny, sometimes moving way of talking about profound things, not to mention dramatic. Of course, we think of La Vie avant soi, but there is no need to burden the author with such references, we must let Mokhtar Amoudi continue his work quietly. It starts under the best auspices.