The 2026 Goncourt Prize was awarded on Tuesday to Philippe Jaenada for “L’Inconnue du quai de Javel”, in which the 62-year-old writer leads the investigation into the assassination of a young Breton woman at the end of the 1950s.
“It makes visible a woman who has been made invisible, a victim, a young victim about whom the police were not too concerned,” the president of Goncourt, Philippe Claudel, told the press after revealing the name of the winner.
The nine members of the Academy gave six votes to Philippe Jaenada and three to Yannick Haenel for “The solitude of teachers is infinite”, which chronicles the difficulties of a young French teacher in the Paris suburbs. “I feel joyful,” declared the winner upon his arrival at the Drouant restaurant in Paris.
A selection shaken up by artificial intelligence
Two other works were in the running – “Things I thought lost” by Clémentine Mélois and “On the other side of the lake” by Sylvain Prudhomme – at the end of a selection impacted by the Thélyson Orélien affair, which brought about artificial intelligence in the world of publishing.
Presented as one of the favorites, Thélyson Orélien’s work “It was that or to die” was withdrawn from the Goncourt selection and eliminated from other literary prizes due to suspicions of use of AI.
Philippe Jaenada thus succeeds Laurent Mauvignier, who won the Goncourt in 2025 with “Maison vide”, which has since become a huge bookstore success.
With “L’inconnue du quai de Javel” (Flammarion), the writer continues in the intimo-police vein which allowed him to conquer a loyal readership with long-lived books like “Sulak” (2013), “La Petite Femelle” (2015) and “La Serpe” (2017).
“When you win a literary prize, it’s great, it’s joy. Because it is one of the important ways to make your book known, to sell books and to have readers.”
