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True crime novel about 1949 murder of Paris life model wins France’s biggest literary prize

By · Via The Guardian · Published by Everything Blog

In short

In *L’Inconnue du quai de Javel*, Philippe Jaenada revisits the death of 29-year-old Louise Cansot, a Montparnasse model who originally moved from Brittany and posed for painter Jean-Louis Boussingault. The 530-page investigation works to dismantle contemporary 300-page police reports and news accounts that maligned Cansot as a drug addict or prostitute. Jaenada, who prepared by reading 74 Inspector Maigret novels, even puts forward a suspect for the 77-year-old unsolved killing. Meanwhile, the literary race saw rare turmoil when the Académie Goncourt disqualified a rival longlisted novel over uncredited artificial intelligence generation.

Key points

  • The winning novel rehabilitates the victim's reputation by challenging historical police…: The winning novel rehabilitates the victim's reputation by challenging historical police claims that labeled her a woman of ill repute.
  • Philippe Jaenada identified a prospective culprit in the 77-year-old murder case after re…: Philippe Jaenada identified a prospective culprit in the 77-year-old murder case after reading 74 Inspector Maigret detective novels.
  • This year's literary award concluded against the backdrop of an unprecedented artificial…: This year's literary award concluded against the backdrop of an unprecedented artificial intelligence disqualification from the Goncourt longlist.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

A literary true-crime investigation that tries to solve a 77-year-old cold case and ends up rehabilitating the reputation of its life model victim has won France’s most prestigious literary prize.

The author Philippe Jaenada was announced on Tuesday afternoon as the winner of the Prix Goncourt for L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), a recreation of the murder of 29-year-old Breton woman Louise Cansot.

Known as “the woman with a hundred portraits” because she was so sought-after as a model for artists in Montparnasse, Cansot was found dead on 7 September 1949, but police never managed to establish the identity of her murderer.

This year’s edition of the Prix Goncourt has been overshadowed by the allegation that one of the other longlisted books, Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien’s C’était ça ou mourir (It Was That or Die), was “almost entirely” written by artificial intelligence.

In the wake of the claims, the Académie Goncourt, a Paris-based literary organisation, withdrew Orélien’s book from its longlist, and his Canadian publisher Boréal severed ties with the writer after…

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