A new literary prize, named the Pascal Prize, launched a call for submissions on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, for a work written in collaboration with artificial intelligence. Presented as the first prize of its kind, it does not aim to evaluate the technology used, but to value the transparency of the authors. The winner is to be announced in mid-December.
- The Pascal Prize rewards a literary work written in collaboration with AI.
- It values authors’ transparency, not the technology they use.
- Candidates must declare the language model and the prompts they used.
- The winner will be announced in mid-December.
“This prize is not a technology competition,” the award’s website specifies. Its founders, entrepreneurs Philippe Rodriguez, Albin Serviant and Gilles Mentré, detailed the terms in a press release. The prize is open to “anyone who writes in French, anywhere in the Francophone world, with no conditions of nationality or residence, and without a publisher.”
The prize’s name references the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. It comes in a context where, according to the organizers, literary prizes are struggling to regulate authors’ use of AI. “The jury is looking for an unpublished work that is useful or that raises awareness,” they add.
Candidates must submit a manuscript, accompanied by a technical file specifying the language model used, i.e., the AI program that generates the text, as well as the use of agents or prompts, the written instructions given to the AI. The jury composition is to be revealed at the end of October.
A controversy in the literary season
The launch of this prize fits into the current events of the literary world, shaken since September by the Thélyson Orélien affair. Accusations of massive use of AI have targeted the novel by the Canadian-Haitian author C’était ça ou mourir, presented as one of the phenomena of the literary season.
On Wednesday, October 21, his Canadian publisher stated that artificial intelligence was indeed used in the writing of the book. The organizers of the Pascal Prize distinguish themselves from usual detection methods. “While others hunt for AI using contradictory detectors, the Pascal Prize asks authors to declare it: neither proselytism nor prosecution, transparency as a ground for debate and collective intelligence,” they assert.
