France's top literary prize drops best selling novel after claims it was written with AI
The organisers of France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, on Friday said they had dropped a top-selling novel by a Canadian-Haitian writer from their longlist following online claims that it was written with artificial intelligence.
This decision “is driven by the desire to preserve the integrity of the prix Goncourt and the Academy itself, whose central role is to promote and honour literature written by women and men,” the Goncourt Academy said.
The decision to remove the book by Thelyson Orelien, a new literary sensation in the French-speaking world, caps a tumultuous week for the 38-year-old following anonymous claims against his debut novel It Was Either That or Die.
He has denied using AI and has suggested the campaign against him is racially motivated as well as an “attempt to silence my voice.” He also has promised to produce a file that will “prove” that he wrote the book himself.
The Goncourt claimed that “several credible researchers and journalists” had highlighted his prize-winning work was “in all likelihood very largely the product of artificial intelligence”. His use of AI is difficult to prove conclusively — various AI detectors give different results — but his reputation has been undercut by evidence of plagiarism published in Quebec where Orelien lives.
Montreal-based La Presse reported that a newspaper column written by him in 2013 was “almost entirely” a “lightly edited translation” of an article published a few days earlier by The Philippine Star.
Originally published in Dawn, September 26th, 2026
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