Although it may not look like it, a certain amount of thought went into the latest blog post on French-speaking literary prizewinners. Five French overseas and francophone prizes were added to the list of mainland French prizes that we usually feature:
Comar d’Or: a Tunisian prize for Tunisian novels running since 1997. Each year, one novel written in French and one written in Arabic are selected.
Grand Prix du Roman Métis: created in 2010 by the city of Saint-Denis in La
Bonbon Chouval by Victor Anicet, trophy of the Carbet prize (source: Victor Anicet’s website)
Réunion (Indian Ocean island and a French overseas territory), it is awarded to a novel written in French that highlights values of diversity, exchange and humanism, and aims at strengthening links between francophone writers.
Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde: created in 1990, administered by l’Institut du Tout-Monde, it is given to an essay or work of fiction illustrating both the plurality and unity of the Caribbean and the Americas. Works selected are written in (or translated into) French or French Creole. The Institut du Tout-Monde was founded by Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, who first directed the prize.
Prix des 5 continents de la Francophonie: created in 2001 by l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the prize aims to highlight the cultural and editorial diversity of the French language around the world. The Organisation serves 88 countries; its foundations were laid in 1970 by the president of Senegal and poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, the president of Tunisia Habib Bourguiba, the president of Niger Hamani Diori and the king of Cambodia Norodom Sihanouk.
Prizes are a good tool to help us determine which books have an impact on the literary scene of the language we collect on, and should therefore be part of our collections. We had first started looking for francophone and French overseas prizes in 2015 (see this blog post written by a less enlightened me), but we had not added them to the list of mainland French prizes that we collect each year, and had not been consistent in following them. As I was tasked with writing this year’s prizewinners blog post, I took it as a good opportunity to look again into my 2015 post and the research I had done for it. In the meantime, the enormous work done first of all by the students of this University to push us to decolonise our practices, and closer to me, by the Decolonising through critical librarianship group, had made me much more aware of issues I had previously not given much thought to. Amongst other things, I started thinking that keeping two separate prize lists created a hierarchy between books in French written by mainland French people and books in French written by everyone else, so I merged the two. I also examined in detail the list of francophone and overseas prizes I had collated in 2015 (the resulting blog post only presented a few of them), checking where they were based and who gave them in order to decide which ones to follow regularly. I especially tried to avoid those that reinforced “gatekeeping”, a concept I have become acquainted with in the steep learning curve I have been on in the past few years, and which describes the process by which a small group of powerful people gets to decide what constitutes good knowledge, or good literature. In the present case, I found that some prizes I had come across in my 2015 research sought to reward francophone literature from around the world but still had a jury of mainly French, mainly white people, so I didn’t keep them.
Countries and regions of the world where French is spoken, either as a main or second language (for a more detailed legend, see source on Wikimedia Commons)
This is still a work in progress, and there are a lot of other questions I’m asking myself, such as: should I be looking in more detail into individual francophone countries? If I’m adding francophone prizes on one side should I not also remove some mainland French prizes on the other? And in that case what should the balance be? And do literary prizes even make sense in other contexts anyway? Could it be just a Western thing? But I also have to wonder whether more research into this would be a good use of my time; it is worth pointing out here that looking at prizes is just one of the many methods we use to determine which works of literature we should collect, by no means the only one. With this post, I wanted to show that we can look at even the smallest aspects of our acquisition work with a more critical approach.
Languages across Borders 
Excellent post Anne-Laure
An excellent initiative, thank you.