Québec publisher Éditions du Boréal says it cannot independently establish the origins of Thélyson Orélien’s manuscript for C’était ça ou mourir, leaving allegations that artificial intelligence was used to write the acclaimed novel unresolved.
In a statement shared today, the publisher said it had been unable to trace the manuscript’s history before September 12, 2025, when its team received the text. The novel remains available in bookstores and sales have kept climbing, despite the controversy surrounding its authorship.
“We would have liked to be able to provide definitive answers to the allegations against him,” the publisher said, according to a report by Agence QMI. It added that it had no evidence allowing it to reconstruct the manuscript’s earlier history.
The announcement follows a statement from Orélien on Tuesday, in which the Canadian-Haitian author denied using AI to generate any part of the novel while acknowledging plagiarism in two earlier works. “Not a single sentence of this book was created by a machine,” Orélien wrote in a statement. He said he began writing the novel in Québec in 2017 and completed a first draft of more than 300 pages in 2019.
Orélien also apologized for passages plagiarized in a 2012 short story and a 2013 opinion piece. He described the incidents as unacceptable mistakes made when he was younger.
The allegations against the novel first surfaced in September, when an account on X claimed that AI-detection software had identified extensive AI-generated text. The accusations prompted renewed scrutiny of the book and its place in France’s literary awards season. The novel was removed from the Prix Goncourt selection, while Boréal suspended promotional activities surrounding the book. It remains in contention for the Prix Renaudot, one of France's most prestigious prizes.
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