Goncourt-listed author Thélyson Orélien, 38, denies writing prize-winning debut novel with AI after detector flags 95% of text

From the Newshound archive · first published 24 September 2026 · last updated 25 September 2026.

Thélyson Orélien, the Canadian-Haitian author whose debut novel 'C'était ça ou mourir' won the Prix du Roman Fnac, has flatly rejected claims the book was written almost entirely by artificial intelligence. An anonymous X account called 'Balance ton Claude' posted AI-detection results on the day he won the prize, triggering a viral storm that has engulfed the French literary world. Le Monde subsequently ran more than half the novel through detector tool Pangram, which flagged over 95% of the tested text as likely AI-generated. Orélien says he is compiling a dossier with his publishers to prove authorship, pointing out the first draft dates to 2019, before generative AI was publicly available.

Orélien says the attacks are racially motivated, telling Libération: 'I am not sad, but angry.'

AFP ran the same excerpts through rival detector InVID-WeVerify, which judged the passages 'very likely written by a human', exposing how unreliable AI detection remains.

French publisher Grasset and Canadian imprint Boreal both back Orélien; the novel remains a finalist for the Goncourt and Renaudot prizes.