Paris: Marie Ndiaye won France`s top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, on Monday, the first woman to do so since 1998.
The 42-year-old won for her novel "Trois Femmes Puissantes" ("Three Powerful Women"), a story about the interweaving lives of three women set in France and Senegal.
"This gives me great pleasure and I am also very happy to be a woman receiving the Goncourt Prize," NDiaye told reporters.
The prize is worth a symbolic 10 euros ($14.80) in cash, but much more in publicity-generated sales.
The winner was announced to journalists after the jury had made its decision over lunch in a Paris restaurant.
NDiaye was born in 1967 to a Senegalese father who left France when she was one year old and a French mother. The author spent her childhood living in a Parisian suburb where she began to write at the age of 12. She now lives in Berlin with her three children.
Bureau Report
First Published: Tuesday, November 3, 2009, 00:46
