Tokyo (AFP) – At a time when AI is shaking up the world of literary prizes, the writing games of the Oulipo movement are resisting and remaining relevant, assures its president Hervé Le Tellier, 2020 Goncourt Prize winner, after a collective challenge on a Japanese train.
Published on: 02/11/2026 - 06:45
The 2026 Goncourt Prize will be awarded on Tuesday following a controversy: the novel “It Was That or To Die” was excluded from the selection, its author Thélyson Orélien being suspected of having used artificial intelligence.
Writers who are members of Oulipo, an experimental literature workshop founded in 1960, could also be tempted to use the machine for their exercises subject to constraints: ban on using a letter, original versified forms, giant palindromes...
Quite the contrary, tells AFP Hervé Le Tellier, current president of Oulipo and himself awarded the Goncourt for his novel "L'Anomalie".
"If we ask the AI to write for us, it's over. It no longer has any interest. My position is that the author is someone who struggles with the question of writing, with the question of the process, the gesture, the reflection," he explains.
“The Thélyson Orélien affair reveals a problem in the relationship to creation, the culture of results” with “people who will want to have a book, including if they do not know how to write or if they do not want to write or if they do not want to confront the question of literary creation”, he judges.
For him, the exercises of the “Potential Literature Workshop” (Oulipo) constitute an antidote: this literary creation workshop lists the potentialities of language by imposing quasi-mathematical constraints... to bring out original literature.
Challenge on a train
Its leading figure, Georges Perec, published “La Disparition” in 1969, a 300-page novel in which the letter “e” never appears. “We are not going to ask the AI to write a second + Disappearance +, that has no interest!”, insists Hervé Le Tellier.
While a major exhibition has been dedicated to the work of Perec (1936-1982) at the National Library of France (BNF) since mid-October, the current members of Oulipo continue "without fail" with their monthly meetings, their publications... and the workshops in schools, with a much appreciated fun and educational dimension.
They have just published a tribute book replaying with Raymond Queneau's "One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" (1961), where each of the stanzas of ten sonnets was combined with the others.
And in 2020 they imagined letters to Santa Claus written by figures as varied as Sherlock Holmes, Edith Piaf or Commander Cousteau...
Latest project to date: four members of Oulipo including Mr. Le Tellier went to Japan at the end of October. With 12 other writers (4 other French and 8 Japanese), they set about writing a joint novel in 24 hours during a train journey: a very Oulipian “procedure” where each participant wrote a chapter.
And a logic for a movement with ancient links with Japan: Perec had co-written a treatise on the game of go, and Oulipian poets quickly took up haiku and tanka, Japanese versified forms.
Japanese translator
When the train arrived in Matsue (west), the Oulipiens led a poetic workshop: in the audience, a big surprise, was Perec's Japanese translator in person.
“He came forward timidly saying that he had translated + The Disappearance +, we almost fell backwards! It’s a tour de force to have transposed it into Japanese”, marvels the French-speaking Argentinian Eduardo Berti.
Instead of the letter "e", the Japanese version omits words and characters containing the sound "i".
And Oulipo is renewing itself: three new members recently joined it.
"It's a living group. It constantly needs to bring in young authors, who sometimes still know little about Oulipo. It is with this arrival of fresh blood that the group survives itself indefinitely", underlines Hervé Le Tellier.
The group is approaching its 800th consecutive monthly meeting: "Every month, we see each other, we dine together, we work. And we have been doing that since 1960", confirms to AFP Paul Fournel, author of poetic "multiplication tables".
For this 79-year-old Oulipo veteran, who welcomed Perec into his home in his youth, there is no fear of AI: “computer science does not resonate literally: the work of the word will not be competed with”.
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© 2026 AFP
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