Prix Goncourt 2026: Philippe Claudel reveals the four finalists and deplores the absence of explanations from Thélyson Orélien

“The machine does not have to be considered in our prize,” reaffirms Philippe Claudel, president of the Académie du Goncourt, at the time of the revelation, on franceinfo, Tuesday October 27, of the four finalists for the literary prize. Are selected: Yannick Haenel, for The Solitude of Professors is Infinite (Gallimard), Philippe Jaenada, for L'inconnue du Quai de Javel (Flammarion), Clémentine Mélois, for Things I Believed Lost (L'Arbalète/Gallimard) and Sylvain Prudhomme, On the Other Side of the Lake (Minuit).

This 124th edition of the Goncourt Prize is marked by the Thélyson Orélien affair, whose book was removed from the first selection of the prize after accusations of plagiarism and use of AI. “I would really have liked him to explain himself, he can do it again, to tell us exactly how he worked,” says Philippe Claudel.

“For us what was important was to reiterate that the Goncourt prize crowns a book which is written by a man, a woman, a human being and that the machine does not have to be considered in our prize,” he insists.

Following this affair, the Académie du Goncourt verified that the other books had not been written with the help of artificial intelligence. “I asked that the sixteen titles that we had in our selection and of which we had the PDFs be passed through the Pangram 4 detector. The result was very high regarding the book by Thélyson Orélien and for the others the machine said that they were absolutely human,” he explains. In the future, he admits, it will be difficult to carry out these checks: "It is not our role, we have neither the means, nor the technical means, nor the capabilities to sift through the 250 books submitted to us."

Philippe Claudel instead calls on publishers to remain vigilant. For him it is up to them to give readers a kind of “moral certificate”, indicating that the published book is indeed written by a human being. “What interests me when I read a book is to enter into the sensitivity, into the soul, into the questioning of one of my fellow men,” declares the president of the Académie du Goncourt.

The name of the winner will be revealed on November 3, during the traditional ceremony at the Drouant restaurant in Paris.