Goncourt Academy removes Or\u00e9lien novel after AI and plagiarism accusations

France's Académie Goncourt has removed Thélyson Orélien's novel C'était ça ou mourir, published in English as It Was Either That or Die, from contention for the 2026 Prix Goncourt.

The withdrawal was announced on Friday, 25 September 2026. The book had appeared in the prize's first selection of 15 titles, an early longlist that is later cut to shortlists.

The Académie said the decision was dictated by the will to preserve the integrity of the Prix Goncourt and of the Académie itself Le Monde. It also linked the decision to rewarding human talent La Presse. The Prix Goncourt, awarded in France for French-language fiction, is one of the country's most watched literary prizes.

The removal followed accusations about how the novel was written. An anonymous account on X called Balance ton Claude accused Orélien of AI use and claimed that, according to Pangram, a software service that claims to detect machine-written text, the novel was written almost entirely by artificial intelligence Publishers Marketplace.

Orélien and his French publisher, Éditions Grasset, denied the claim that the novel was written almost entirely by AI. No court ruling or independent finding on authorship was reported in the available sources.

A separate line of accusation concerns earlier books. Orélien was accused of plagiarism in multiple works published before the advent of generative AI. Those allegations concern writing that predates widely available AI text tools and stand apart from the AI claim made about C'était ça ou mourir.

The book at the centre of the dispute already has a wide publishing footprint. It is a winner of the Prix Fnac, a French prize organised with the Fnac retail chain, and it had been nominated for the Goncourt before the withdrawal.

Translation rights, meaning agreements that allow local publishers to issue the book in their own languages and territories, have sold in 20 countries. In the United States, the rights were acquired by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

For readers following prize season, the practical effect is narrow but final. The novel remains published and in circulation, but it can no longer win the 2026 Goncourt. The Académie has not named a replacement title in the reports of its decision.