PARIS.- For African writers living in France, there is a dream they will never acknowledge publicly, a character says in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novel, “The Most Secret Memory of Men.” That dream — “our shame, but also the glory we fantasize about” — is to be praised by France and its literary establishment.

The post-colonial relationship between France and its former African colonies is a deeply fraught one. Even six decades after their independence, France looms large not only in their politics and economies, but also in their imagination.

“The relationship with Paris is very strong because, in the end, there is only Paris,” Sarr said. “When we meet anglophone African writers, they’re surprised that the relationship with France is still so strong.”

France remains omnipresent for many francophone African authors like Sarr, 32, who grew up in Senegal and has lived in France for the past dozen years. Their readers are in France, Sarr said, and France remains the place of literary “judgment, validation and recognition.”

Late last year, Sarr became the first writer from Africa south of the Sahara to win France’s top literary prize, the Goncourt, established in 1903. But it wasn’t only his background that stood out. A subject of his novel was precisely the French literary establishment, which he describes with a mix of harshness, ridicule and affection.

So why did this establishment grant him its highest award?

“I don’t know how to interpret it exactly,” Sarr said, in a 2 1/2-hour interview in the Paris office of his publisher, Philippe Rey. “Does it mean that they have a better sense of humor, more self-derision, than believed? Or is it a way to silence me, or to endorse me with the prize?”

He added, “But I really hope that it’s because it’s above all a good book.”

The novel — “La plus secrète mémoire des hommes” in French — was praised nearly universally, with Le Monde calling it “a great book.”

At its heart is a quest to find a long-forgotten (and fictitious) Senegalese author, T.C. Elimane, who briefly won praise for a novel published in France in 1938, at the height of the colonial era. Initially praised by the French literary establishment, which dubbed him the “black Rimbaud,” the character is accused of plagiarism, his book is withdrawn from circulation, and he is reduced to silence.

“The Most Secret Memory of Men” — whose main narrator is a young novelist who appears to be a stand-in for Sarr himself — is told in various literary styles, with French, African and Latin American influences. The story travels through space and time, from contemporary Paris to postwar Argentina to a Senegalese village. Besides the main narrator, a collection of voices complement one another to form an overall story, as one of the novel’s main goals is to put different realities and traditions “on the same level,” Sarr said.

Sarr’s book was inspired by the real-life story of a Malian writer, Yambo Ouologuem, whose novel, “Bound to Violence,” won France’s second-most prestigious prize, the Renaudot, in 1968. Accused of plagiarism, Ouologuem stopped writing and returned to Mali.

The accusations of plagiarism against the fictional and real-life authors — who incorporated Western literature into their work, using it for their purposes — touch upon a central question of colonialism and Africa’s place in the world today, Sarr said. Western writers — anyone from Jean de La Fontaine to James Joyce — could cull from the past without accusations of plagiarism because the Western canon was considered part of their heritage.

“People are very happy when an African, because of colonialism, writes in a European language that was a colonial language,” Sarr said. “But I get the impression that there are limits. It shouldn’t go too far. By too far, I mean, there shouldn’t be insolence or irreverence.”

“When you are the source of a heritage,” he continued, “you have to be able to accept that your heirs, in appropriating that heritage, renounce that heritage or make fun of it.”

Which is exactly what his novel did.

The Goncourt can make careers overnight, and Sarr has kept a busy schedule more than half a year after his victory. Nearly 40 translations of his novels are in the works; the English version of his prizewinner is slated to appear next spring.

It was his fourth novel since he started writing a decade ago, following his move from Senegal to France.

“I started to write because of solitude,” he recalled, “and there was also the experience of immigration, and all the little problems that immigration exposes.”

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The oldest of seven brothers, Sarr grew up in Diourbel, a small and dusty city in the center of Senegal, not far from Touba, the center of the dominant Sufi Muslim brotherhood called the Mourides. Family life was rooted in the tradition of the Mourides and the culture of his ethnic group, the Serer.

He learned to speak Serer at home, and, then later, Wolof, Senegal’s main language, around the neighborhood. At home, in keeping with the Serer’s matriarchal tradition, his mother and grandmother would tell him tales about the family and the wider world, often in the courtyard where a mat was laid out in the evenings. This oral tradition infuses his novel, in which critical truths are revealed through the narration of a woman called the Mother Spider.

French, he learned in the private Catholic school he attended in Diourbel, though he regularly heard it at home from his father, a medical doctor, who would send his son to bookstores. His father, a subscriber to several newspapers, regularly tasked his son with writing “press summaries of the news, random events or what the president went to inaugurate that day,” Sarr said.

“I was born in an environment that encouraged me from a very young age to seek words and books,” Sarr recalled. “But there was no library at home where I found an existing collection of books. Instead, there were books that were bought for me or given to me when I asked for them.”

Though his mother also speaks French, Sarr has always communicated with her strictly in Serer. With his father, it has always been a mix of Serer and French.

After going to high school in Saint-Louis — the former colonial capital of French West Africa along Senegal’s Atlantic coast — Sarr, like many of his home country’s brightest students, came to France to further his studies.

His first three novels dealt with contemporary themes — Islamic extremism; migration; and homosexuality in Senegal. The more timeless themes in “The Most Secret Memory of Men” began to germinate in his mind as soon as he began writing a decade ago.

Living in Beauvais, a city about 50 miles north of Paris, Sarr started writing full time after his studies and also began scrutinizing the French literary establishment, which plays a crucial role in his novel.

“I spent many years on the periphery of that world — observing it, reading its books and getting to know its figures before I entered it, somewhat brutally, almost like a breaking and entering,” Sarr said.

His entry was initiated in September when his novel was included on the long list of the Goncourt.

France’s literary awards are regulated by a clubby, insular world that tends to reward established members in a time-honored exercise of back-scratching that generally blocks newcomers. Juries are dominated by aging white men who are appointed for life; some are editors at big publishing houses and go so far as to champion books they have edited themselves. The literary juries symbolize a France resistant to change.

“I’m not sure that France’s literary institutions can continue functioning like that much longer,” Sarr said.

Alone among the major awards, the Goncourt has carried out overhauls to make it more credible. Still, even the Goncourt was hit with a scandal in September as one of its 10 jurors lobbied and cast a vote for a novel written by her romantic partner.

Sarr’s brothers and parents began closely following the evolution of each list as it was whittled down. A brother sent him a news alert even before he himself learned that he had made the short list.

In November, on the day the Goncourt was to announce its new laureate, Sarr waited in the tiny Paris offices of his publisher. He was informed he had won a few minutes before the official announcement — and the flood of news articles announcing that France’s most prestigious literary prize had been awarded for the first time to a writer from sub-Saharan Africa.

Sarr called his parents in Senegal. The usual greetings taken care of, the son delivered the news to his father.

“We got it,” he said, using the French pronoun “on.”

They had broken into the house.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.