I have a feeling this might become a bigger international story. It is already international in its scope, with a Haitian-born, Quebec-based writer at the center of it and the French literary culture that encountered him earlier this year. Thélyson Orélien achieved every writer’s dream when, in March 2026, the Quebec publisher, Les Éditions du Boréal, turned his manuscript, C’était ça ou mourir, into an overnight sensation. Enough to get the attention of France’s publishing giant, Éditions Grasset, who gave the book a whole new level of exposure in French bookstores, publishing their own edition of it on August 19. On September 21, Orélien was awarded the Prix du roman Fnac, a prestigious annual prize presented by the French retail chain Fnac. Prior to this year, Orélien was, we might say, a complete unknown—not to say he lacked a history worth considering, for certainly he had published poetry and stories in a quieter way, but suddenly he burst onto the scene, like a rolling stone, to achieve a leading role in the Francophone world of bibliophiles and critics. His story is both foreign and familiar, of a teacher migrating from Haiti to Canada, wanting a better life. There is nothing more human than wanting a better life, than a willingness, indeed, to suffer in the now in order to make a better tomorrow. Indeed, his book was selected for many prizes in France, including the most prestigious Prix Goncourt, Prix Renaudot, and Prix Femina. It’s a dizzying journey, a different kind of migration, from Nobody Particular to Somebody Extraordinary, creating buzz among high-brow jurors and suddenly forced to turn down interview-invites because there is only one of him to go around. A whirlwind, for sure! From September 2nd, the day the Prix Goncourt selection was announced, to September 21 as he wins the Prix du roman Fnac, and at last to a timestamp on that very day, when it all came crashing down. Like a pinch, waking up from a dream, the X account of the group called “Balance ton Claude,” a reference to Anthropic’s mathematical whiz chatbot, tweeted (do we still call them tweets?) to say it had used AI detection software to analyze Orélien’s book and they found it to be “almost totally” written by AI, with some passages yielding the “100% AI” result.
Well, whatever the AI detection groups say, the internet has opinions too, and if there’s one thing the internet is good at, it’s irony detection: the irony that, if the allegation is true, apparently AI writing has come a long way—to be chosen in the first selection for a Prix Goncourt! What’s next? Will Claude write his way into a Pulitzer Prize? Will ChatGPT win a Nobel Prize for Literature? It would be funny if it wasn’t so devastating—for the author, for the reader, and for all of us who feel so adrift from reality, from ourselves, from the truth we no longer trust. It is incredibly frustrating, to suddenly feel at a loss to know what’s real. Pierre Assouline, of the Academie Goncourt that decided on September 25 to pull Orélien’s book from its first-selection list, talked about exactly that sort of disillusionment, in Le Nouvel Obs. He was confounded; he had read the book and liked it, but even as he read it, liking it, he felt uncertain. The writing, he said in French, was so smooth, almost too perfect. Assouline noted further that the writing seemed at odds with the speech he encountered from the author’s interviews. Assouline did acknowledge, in fairness, that we don’t all speak as we write. That is definitely true of me. As an introvert, I’m more comfortable as a writer. In speech, I tend to hesitate and stumble; it’s hard to find the words in speech that come so easily for the page. That doesn’t even account for the nervous wreck I would be in Orélien’s shoes, with the world listening to him, and analyzing every word as a revelation!
And then there was the Instagram post (from September 26) from Nicolas Mathieu, famous Goncourt winner himself, reminding us that what is really at issue here is the reason that we write. We write because we feel. We feel from the body. The feelings often come from the thoughts in the mind, the perceptions in the world, but it always, as Mathieu put it finally, in the last sentence of his post, comes down to the body. Writing comes from the body. (Mathieu, after all, is so good at putting the sensations we feel in our bodies into words; I made the same observation in my piece about his novel Connemara.)
What we write does, it’s true, come from the body, and then it goes out to readers, to impact other bodies. To make others feel. Mathieu didn’t say it; he didn’t have to: Thélyson Orélien made a lot of people feel, through his book, the violence and disruption of the migrant. The allegations of AI use don’t make those feelings invalid. Mathieu said in his post that we’re living in an era of doubt. Doubting our senses, perhaps. Maybe we forgot not just the reason that we write but also the reason that we read. To feel?! Enough people felt a great deal from Orélien’s book for it to become an overnight sensation. The Academie Goncourt selected it for consideration. And then revoked the honor. Regrettable, if only for the missed opportunity to see how far this novel could have gone!
So, relevantly, when I got to this point in the drafting this article, I consulted ChatGPT as a proofreader. Yeah. It’s true. {Hanging my head in shame, but lifting it up again as I remind myself, I am not alone. Because I see you. You do it too.} Anyway, the proofreader suggested that I add something about the accusations of plagiarism that followed the AI allegation against the novel C'était ça ou mourir. When once we have an idea, another one follows to give it validation. Le Point reported that a story Orélien wrote in 2012, which won Radio-Canada’s Prix du Public and is titled, Où va le monde, had allegedly borrowed passages from the preface of a 1960 work by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. That’s another matter, nothing to do with AI, of course, given that it happened when Artificial Intelligence was, at that time, basically the voice in your car telling you to turn left after you’d already passed the turn and could only turn right. I’ve always had a hard time wrapping my head around plagiarism in general. I remember being tempted to over-cite my academic papers because of that insecure feeling. Just in case, you know? Better to cite when you don’t have to than to risk not citing when you should have. But then, the habit of over-explaining myself is one of my Achilles heels. That being said, I’d rather leave the “did he or didn’t he” debate to those with enough expertise to be confident.
I’ll just say, in conclusion, that what is so devastating to me is the aforementioned doubt. The lack of trust. The suspicion that we’re going to have to reconcile ourselves to. Because AI isn’t trapped in Pandora’s Box. It’s out there, warts and all, and whether it will save or destroy us, we can’t turn back time. I’m inclined to the seemingly unpopular feeling that it will neither save nor destroy us. It will just be another thing we have to live with. Another challenge. We’ll continue to get wake up calls. We will have to navigate each one. Much more disturbing is the way our fears lead us to doubt our feelings.
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References
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/books/article/2026/09/26/who-is-thelyson-orelien-the-young-writer-whose-promising-literary-breakthrough-abruptly-unraveled_6757965_33.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck7v4y45893go
https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/avant-lia-le-plagiat-thelyson-orelien-la-polemique-rebondit-Z6IY4FD2NBA4NI7ZLJXSCH3V5Y/