The French author Laurent Mauvignier has been awarded the 2025 Prix Goncourt for La Maison vide (The Empty House), a sweeping 750-page family saga.

In this powerful novel, Mauvignier tells a fictionalised story inspired by three generations of women in his own family. At the heart of the book is Marie-Ernestine, a young girl who falls in love with her teacher and dreams of moving to Paris to become a pianist. Her husband is later killed in the First World War, leaving Marie-Ernestine alone to raise their daughter, Marguerite. Haunted by family silence and missing faces in old photographs, Mauvignier sets out to uncover why Marguerite’s image was scratched away from family albums.

Laurent Mauvignier is a celebrated French novelist. In 2006, he received the Prix du Roman Fnac for Dans la foule (In the Crowd), a novel about the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster in Brussels.