Philippe Vasset Wins the 2026 Prix Médicis for Dans les grandes lignes

The 2026 prix Médicis goes to Philippe Vasset for Dans les grandes lignes (Flammarion), a book about walking under France's power lines. Jurors met at the restaurant La Méditerranée in Paris on November 2, and Livres Hebdo reported the result soon after. It went down to the wire: five votes for Vasset, four for Lucie Rico and her P.O.L novel Mais que fait ce sang sur le pull de Jennifer ?

The Médicis opens the busiest week of the French literary season. As franceinfo noted, the Renaudot and the Goncourt follow on Tuesday and the Femina on Wednesday.

A walk under the power lines

The book came out on August 26 and is Vasset's 14th, according to Livres Hebdo. In it he follows France's high-voltage lines on foot. According to his publisher, quoted by franceinfo, he spent long months walking beneath the cables that cross the country. Along the way he finds landscapes most people never notice and meets some unusual people. Livres Hebdo says the journey, which also crosses borders, brings out the hidden stakes of electricity and what it does to the land and to the mind.

Vasset is a journalist as well as a novelist. franceinfo called the Médicis the first major prize of his career. He takes over from Emmanuel Carrère, who won last year with Kolkhoze (P.O.L). Livres Hebdo says that book has now sold more than 255,000 copies.

The other winners

There are two more Médicis prizes, one for a translated novel and one for an essay. Eva Baltasar picked up the first with Déclin et fascination (Verdier), which Annie Bats translated from Catalan. Her narrator loses her job in Barcelona, takes work cleaning other people's homes and ends up in a shared house with no heating.

The essay prize went to Jean-Baptiste Del Amo for Une éclaircie, published by Stock in its "Ma nuit au musée" series. Del Amo spent a night with Goya's work in Madrid in 2023, at the Prado and at the San Antonio de la Florida hermitage. Against the painter's darkest pictures he writes about illness and how it upended his life and his writing.

The jury also gave a special prize to Richard Zenith for Pessoa, l'œuvre-vie (Seuil), his large biography of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.

The jury and the shortlist

The novelist Pascale Roze chairs the ten-member jury. Télérama reported that it also includes the writers Marie Darrieussecq, Anne Garréta and Andreï Makine. Jurors vote by secret ballot, round after round, until one book gets a majority.

The jury's selection had seven French-language books, nine foreign novels and twelve essays. Among the other French finalists, Télérama named Anne Godard's Nous aussi (Actes Sud), Lucie Berard's first novel Décolorer sa fille (Les Intranquilles) and Daria Marx's Tuer le vieux (Flammarion), along with Rico's book.

One title from the first selection was missing by the end. Thélyson Orélien's C'était ça ou mourir (Grasset) was dropped after it was accused of being written largely with artificial intelligence. franceinfo said his Canadian publisher has since confirmed that suspicion.

Jean-Pierre Giraudoux and Gala Barbisan set up the Médicis in 1958, and it has rewarded French-language writing every year since.

Photo: Philippe Vasset in 2018. Photo by Librairie Mollat, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.