Mauritian author Priya Hein has been appointed Chair of the Prix Goncourt — Choix de l’île Maurice for its second edition, running 2025–2026, under the patronage of the Académie Goncourt. The announcement was made at the launch of the new edition, held at the Institut Français de Maurice, with the participation of Philippe Claudel, President of the Académie Goncourt.

Sharing the news on her Instagram page, Hein expressed her delight at the invitation, extending warm thanks to the Institut Français de Maurice and praising what she called a “belle initiative.” She will lead the jury for the second cycle of a prize that, in its first edition, drew in over a hundred young readers from ten schools and universities across the island, before ultimately selecting Gaël Faye’s Jacaranda as its winner.

The Prix Goncourt — Choix de l’île Maurice is part of the Académie Goncourt’s expansive international network of regional prizes, supported locally by the French Embassy and the Institut Français de Maurice. Each edition invites young Mauritian readers to engage with the Goncourt shortlist and elect their own winner through a process of reading, debate, and oral presentation; placing youth at the very centre of the literary conversation rather than at its margins.

It is a role that suits Hein well. Her debut novel Riambel won both the Jean-Fanchette Prize 2021, with its manuscript selected by a jury chaired by Nobel laureate J.M.G. Le Clézio, and the Prix Athéna 2023, announcing her as a significant new voice in Mauritian literature. She had been nominated by the National Library of Mauritius for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2017, and in 2019 participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program Women’s Creative Mentorship Project. She returned to the IWP in 2024 to complete the Fall Residency, becoming only the fifth writer from Mauritius to do so.

Her second novel, Tamarin, published in September 2025, follows Anita, a Mauritian woman living in London who, after the collapse of her marriage, longs to return home to reckon with the island’s colonial history, her own past, and the question of where she belongs. The book has since been shortlisted for the 2026 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards in the Fiction with a Sense of Place category, alongside Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah and Irene Solà. The Prix Goncourt chairship is the latest entry on a list that keeps growing and a fitting one for a writer whose work has consistently refused to look away.

Congratulations, Priya. This one is well deserved.