I´m not in an agreement with this Literary Saloon (and Renaudot proze jury chairman Brincourt) claim that book prizes are about promoting writers and so shouldn´t be given to books by dead now dead authors, because the writers are not the only ones that prizes promote; they promote also the book.

Lifetime achievement awards belong to people who are alive, but there´s nothing wrong giving a prize to a book that has been published just for the first time and whose author is dead. Goncourt prize is really about promoting the book, for example. All the money that the author will gain by getting the prize comes from the increased sales - which the prize causes - of the book.