--- title: Philippe Vasset Wins the Prix Médicis 2026 for Two Years on Foot Beneath France's High-Voltage Lines description: Philippe Vasset won the Prix Médicis 2026 for Dans les grandes lignes, his walk under France's high-voltage lines. The book, the vote and the other winners. author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-03T14:01:09.639Z updated: 2026-11-03T14:01:09.720Z canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/philippe-vasset-prix-medicis-2026 image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-7245197.webp categories: Literary Culture content_type: News region: France publication: The Quantum of Light about: - type: Person name: Philippe Vasset description: French writer and journalist, born in 1972, winner of the Prix Médicis 2026 for Dans les grandes lignes. jobTitle: Writer and journalist --- ### Book: Dans les grandes lignes By Philippe Vasset Philippe Vasset spends two years crossing France on foot beneath the high-voltage power lines, from the Paris region outwards. Winner of the Prix Médicis 2026. [Decitre](https://www.decitre.fr/livres/dans-les-grandes-lignes-9782080165978.html) Philippe Vasset won the Prix Médicis on Monday 2nd November for Dans les grandes lignes (Flammarion), a book in which he follows France's high-voltage power lines on foot. The nine jurors met at La Méditerranée, a restaurant in Paris, and chose Vasset by five votes to four over Lucie Rico, author of Mais que fait ce sang sur le pull de Jennifer ? (P.O.L). It is the first major literary prize for the 54-year-old writer, and it opened the busiest week of the French literary year, with the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Renaudot announced on Tuesday 3rd November and the Prix Femina on Wednesday 4th November. ## Dans les grandes lignes and the Walk Under the Pylons Vasset spent two years crossing France on foot from the Paris region, walking hundreds of kilometres beneath the cables of the high-voltage network. The book, his fourteenth, came out on 26th August and runs to 192 pages. It records landscapes most people only see from a car, the unexpected people he met along the way and the mark electricity leaves on the land and on the minds of those who live beside it. In the book he writes that the great pylons are rarely seen up close: they stand in the middle of fields, and you look at them from the road without really seeing them. Pascale Roze, who announced the prizes for the jury, called the book fascinating, concrete, geographical, scientific, funny and poetic. Vasset said he was particularly happy to win 'for such an improbable book', and admitted his publisher had been doubtful when he first described the idea. ## Philippe Vasset, Journalist of Maps and Secrets Vasset was born in 1972 and studied geography, philosophy and international relations. He won the Prix du Jeune Écrivain in 1993, worked for an American corporate investigation firm and joined the Paris press group Indigo Publications in 2001. He was editor-in-chief of Intelligence Online, its newsletter on the intelligence world, from 2007 to 2014, and today edits Glitz, its newsletter on the luxury business. With the journalist Pierre Gastineau he presents Conversations secrètes, a France Culture podcast about spies that has since become a book. The pylon walk belongs to a line of books about the places maps leave out. Un livre blanc (Fayard, 2007) took him, over a year in the early 2000s, into the areas left blank on the official IGN maps of the Paris region. Une vie en l'air (Fayard, 2018) followed the abandoned aérotrain of the engineer Jean Bertin, a ruin of the future that had haunted him since childhood. Alongside these he has written novels, among them La Conjuration and A cappella, and a series of fictional diaries written in the voices of a predator, an arms dealer and a blackmailer. ### Philippe Vasset's Earlier Books - [Un livre blanc](https://www.decitre.fr/livres/un-livre-blanc-9782213634111.html) by Philippe Vasset - [Une vie en l'air](https://www.decitre.fr/livres/une-vie-en-l-air-9782213710099.html) by Philippe Vasset - La Conjuration by Philippe Vasset - A cappella by Philippe Vasset ## The Other Prix Médicis 2026 Winners The foreign novel prize went to the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar for Déclin et fascination (Verdier), translated by Annie Bats. Her narrator loses her job in Barcelona, takes work as a cleaner and moves into a shared house with no heating. The essay prize went to the novelist Jean-Baptiste Del Amo for Une éclaircie (Stock). In 2023 he spent a night with the paintings of Goya at the Prado in Madrid, and the book turns that night into a reflection on illness and on how it changed his life and his writing. A special jury prize went to Richard Zenith for Pessoa, l'œuvre-vie (Seuil), his biography of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, first published in English in 2021 as Pessoa: An Experimental Life. ### The Three Other Winning Books - Déclin et fascination by Eva Baltasar - Une éclaircie by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo - Pessoa, l'œuvre-vie by Richard Zenith ## How the Prix Médicis Works Gala Barbisan and Jean-Pierre Giraudoux founded the Médicis in 1958 to reward a writer whose fame has not yet caught up with their talent. It has kept a reputation as the rebel of the autumn prizes and is often called the anti-Goncourt. This year's jury was Marianne Alphant, Michel Braudeau, Marie Darrieussecq, Dominique Fernandez, Anne Garréta, Patrick Grainville, Andreï Makine, Pascale Roze and Alain Veinstein. Last year's winner, Emmanuel Carrère's Kolkhoze, has sold more than 255,000 copies. Dans les grandes lignes has not yet been published in English. If you read French, it is the most direct way into a writer who has spent twenty years mapping the parts of France you usually drive past. ### Also in This Story - [Mais que fait ce sang sur le pull de Jennifer ?](https://www.decitre.fr/livres/mais-que-fait-ce-sang-sur-le-pull-de-jennifer-9782818060636.html) by Lucie Rico - Kolkhoze by Emmanuel Carrère