Vincent Delecroix
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Vincent Philippe Pierre Maurice Delecroix (born 26 November 1969) is a French philosopher and novelist. He is a specialist on Søren Kierkegaard, on whom he did his doctoral thesis. He has published ten full-length works on philosophy and teaches at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He has published eight full-length works of fiction.
He received the Prix Valery Larbaud in 2007 for the novel Ce qui est perdu and the Grand prix de littérature de l'Académie française in 2008 for the novel Tombeau d'Achille. Small Boat, Helen Stevenson's translation of his 2023 novel Naufrage, was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
Born in Paris in 1969, Delecroix graduated from the city's École normale supérieure and is an agrégé of philosophy. He teaches and is director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, specialising in philosophy of religion and Søren Kierkegaard.[1][2]
His literary and philosophical work is attentive to existential acts and experiences, such as love, singing and the sacred.[citation needed]
He was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2007[3] and a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite in 2023.[4]
Works
La chaussure sur le toit
Delecroix's 2007 work La chaussure sur le toit consists of ten short stories on the same theme: a shoe placed on the roof of the building opposite, in Paris. Each story explores the history and character of a different protagonist: a dreamy child, a burglar in love, three crazy thugs, an undocumented immigrant, a television presenter, a melancholic dog, a homosexual firefighter, an eccentric old woman, a contemporary artist, and a trouser-wearing angel.[citation needed]
Naufrage
Naufrage was published in French in 2023 and was longlisted for the 2023 Prix Goncourt.[1] The English translation by Helen Stevenson, Small Boat, was published in 2025 and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.[5][6] It also won an English PEN Translates award.[7] It is the first of his novels to be translated into English.[1]
The book was written in three weeks, and is based on the November 2021 English Channel disaster, in which 28 people died when an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized.[5][8] The French authorities received calls for help, but insisted that the boat was in British waters and that the British authorities must respond. Delecroix's book is narrated by the radio operator who took the calls for help, and who refuses to be held more responsible than all the other factors that have contributed to the event. The Times Literary Supplement described it as "vividly translated" and "painful, compelling and mercifully short, with a powerful undertow".[9]
Delecroix has said of the book that it is "a fiction that tries to imagine how someone with no evil in her, who is just anybody, can act and talk in such an inhuman manner and become a striking example of the so-called 'banality of evil', as Hannah Arendt put it."[8]
