Philippe Vasset wins 2026 Prix Médicis for novel on France's high-voltage power lines

The prize

Philippe Vasset won the 2026 Prix Médicis on Monday, 2 November, for his novel Dans les grandes lignes (Flammarion, 192 pages, priced at 21 euros). The prize was announced at the La Méditerranée restaurant in Paris. The jury is presided over by novelist Pascale Roze and includes writers Marie Darrieussecq, Anne Garréta and Andreï Makine. It chose Vasset's book over six other selected titles, all of them written by women. Announcing the winners, Roze said of Vasset:

“Philippe Vasset is an author who keeps to the byways, this time under the power lines, from pylon to pylon.”

She described the book as fascinating, concrete, geographical, scientific, funny and poetic.

The book

The novel follows Vasset on foot across France, tracing high-voltage power lines without maps and starting from the Paris region. Vasset, who is 54, spent two years covering hundreds of kilometres along the lines. La Libre reports that the project began when he heard the crackling and buzzing the lines produce near Genneviliers, and it describes the lines as carrying 400,000 volts. Along the route he crosses fields and woods, finds ways over motorways and TGV lines, skirts restricted zones, gets lost in muddy dead ends and is caught out by nightfall. His publisher was sceptical when he first pitched the project, and Vasset said he was particularly happy to be rewarded for 'such an improbable book'. He works as a journalist for the Indigo Publications group, which covers geopolitics and intelligence, and writes a newsletter on luxury. This autumn his publisher reissued two older books alongside the new one: Un livre blanc and Une vie en l'air.

The other prizes

Eva Baltasar, a Catalan writer, won the foreign novel prize for Déclin et fascination (Verdier), translated from Catalan by Annie Bats. Her story follows a woman evicted from her home in Barcelona who takes cleaning work to avoid homelessness, then finds refuge in an isolated house where she forms a disturbing relationship with another woman. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo won the essay prize for Une éclaircie (Stock), which revisits an illness and how it changed his relationship with his body, with time and with writing, in dialogue with paintings by Francisco de Goya. A special jury prize went to Richard Zenith, an American naturalised Portuguese writer, translator and researcher, for Pessoa, l'oeuvre-vie (Seuil), a 1,200-page biography of Fernando Pessoa translated by Nicolas Richard. Zenith's English original, Pessoa: A Biography, appeared in 2021.

Context and omissions

As with other prizes, the Médicis jury did not keep Thélyson Orélien's novel C'était ça ou mourir (Grasset) in its selection. The book has been accused of being largely written by artificial intelligence, a charge its author denies. The 2025 Médicis went to Emmanuel Carrère for Kolkhoze (P.O.L). This year's announcement came the day before the Goncourt and Renaudot prizes and two days before the Femina.