A New French Prize Wants Novels Written With AI
A new French literary prize is asking writers to send in manuscripts co-written with artificial intelligence, and it promises the winner publication. The Prix Pascal de Littérature IA opened for entries in the week of 21 October 2026, as The Guardian reported.
The rules are specific. Entries must be unpublished manuscripts of between 10,000 and 50,000 words, and they must be written in French. Entrants can live anywhere. Each one must name the AI model and the prompt, meaning the written instruction, used to generate the text. All major language models are allowed, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and LLaMA.
The terms ask for a work of fiction. They also say submitted texts should help solve an ethical, social or ecological problem facing humanity. According to the official Prix Pascal site, the jury alone picks the winner and judges each manuscript on its aesthetic, narrative and stylistic quality.
Applications opened in October and close at the end of November 2026. The organisers will draw up a shortlist of 10, meaning the finalists chosen before the winner, and announce the winner in early December. The jury will have five or six members, drawn from writers, critics, journalists, philosophers and publishers. Its names are due in early November.
The prize was founded by Philippe Rodriguez, Albin Serviant and Gilles Mentré, three technology entrepreneurs. Rodriguez is a founding partner at Avolta, a firm that advises on mergers and acquisitions, which are deals where companies buy or combine with one another. Serviant is a digital media entrepreneur and a former chair of the LGBTQ+ magazine Têtu. Mentré is a former civil servant with a PhD in philosophy. He teaches at Harvard and at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and he co-founded Electis, an online voting platform. The prize takes its name from Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French thinker.
The launch comes at a sensitive moment. The Guardian reported that it arrived amid controversy over possible AI use by finalists and winners of several 2026 literary prizes, including the Commonwealth short story prize, the Caine prize for African writing and the Prix Goncourt, one of France's best-known fiction awards. Le Figaro described the Prix Pascal as the first literary prize to reward a book written with artificial intelligence. Firstpost called it France's first prize for works co-written with AI.
What stands out for readers is the paperwork. Entrants must declare their tools before the jury reads a word, so the record of how a book was made sits alongside the manuscript. The Bookseller reported that this disclosure requirement is part of the prize's design.
The next checkpoints are concrete: the jury list in early November, the close of entries at the end of November, and the winner in early December 2026.
