The Académie Goncourt, often described as the French rival to the Booker Prize, has removed the novel "C'était Ça ou Mourir" by Telaison Orelien from this year’s longlist. The prize judges said the work is "very likely to a large extent" the product of artificial intelligence; a claim the 38-year-old author strongly denies.
The novel, which tells the story of a Haitian teacher’s journey to escape gang violence and cross twelve countries to reach Canada, had previously won the Fnac Novel Prize, sold about 35,000 copies and had its translation rights sold in more than 20 countries. The book, published in August by Grasset, was on the verge of being shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize.
The allegation of AI use was first made on Monday by an anonymous X account called "Balance ton Claude"; an account that at the time had fewer than 100 followers. Citing the result of an AI-detection tool called Pangram - which Substack also uses to scan posts - the account claimed the novel was almost entirely machine-written. The claim quickly went viral, although some other detection tools used by French media produced conflicting results and assessed the writing as likely human.
On Friday, Samuel Fitoussi, a columnist for the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, admitted he was a member of the group behind the account. At the same time, reports from French and Canadian media including Libération and La Presse emerged alleging that Orelien had committed plagiarism in earlier works; including copying a short story related to the book "The Morning of the Witches" by French writer Louis Pauwels (1960) and an opinion article from the Philippine newspaper The Philippine Star from 2013.
The Académie Goncourt said in a statement the decision was made to "preserve the integrity of the Goncourt Prize and of the academy itself," whose central role is to promote and value literature written by human beings. The body said it would make no further comment before announcing its final list on 6 October.
In response to the decision, Orelien described the allegations as racially motivated and an attempt to "silence" her voice, and vowed to present a dossier proving she wrote the novel independently; a claim she says could even be proven by "rewriting the same book with a pen." Her Canadian publisher, Boréal, suspended the book’s promotional tour on Friday, while backing Orelien and urging against rushed judgment before the facts are clear. Grasset said it still has "full confidence" in her poetic work.
According to Digital Trends, the controversy - which Reuters reported the Académie Goncourt made public in France - has rapidly gone beyond a single book and sparked a wider dispute in France’s cultural sphere about race, literary merit and the authenticity of works. The case recalls a similar controversy earlier this year that embroiled the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in comparable AI-use allegations.
The case could become a key example of how the publishing industry confronts artificial intelligence, because it raises two simultaneous issues for publishers and judges: how to detect covert AI use in produced works and how to prevent wrongfully accusing authors whose works are incorrectly flagged by detection tools.