François-Henri Désérable won the 2026 Prix Renaudot for his wine novel Le Palais

French writer François-Henri Désérable won the 2026 Prix Renaudot on Tuesday, November 3, for Le Palais, a novel centered on wine, winemaking and social ascent.

Désérable received six of the 10 votes cast by the jury, which was chaired this year by the writer Frédéric Beigbeder. He finished ahead of David Djaïz, whose novel La méthode received four votes. Speaking to Agence France-Presse after the result, Désérable said he had not expected to win and believed until the last moment that the prize would go elsewhere.

He also said he was dedicating the award to winemakers, calling them artists who turn grapes into pleasure. The remark underscored the central subject of the book, which takes wine seriously not only as a product but as a craft, a culture and a world of status and expertise.

Le Palais follows Arun Kumar, an Indian orphan adopted in 1998 by a couple of restaurant owners in Burgundy. The novel traces his path from that upbringing to strong studies in oenology and then into elite circles in New York, where his talent becomes a way into a rarefied social world. The book mixes elements of an adventure story with a coming-of-age novel and places wine at the center of questions about identity, ambition and authenticity.

Désérable, who is 39, said the idea for the novel came to him in 2020 after lockdown restrictions were lifted, during a stay in Burgundy. He then spent five years learning the details of viticulture and winemaking, including the cycle of the vine and the importance of barrels in shaping a wine’s character. That research helped give Le Palais a technical foundation as well as a literary one.

Part of the story was inspired by the real-life case of Rudy Kurniawan, an Indonesian-born wine expert who became known for forging rare and expensive bottles before being convicted in the United States in 2014. By drawing on that case, Désérable connected the novel’s world of connoisseurship with fraud, money and the pressures of reputation inside the luxury wine market.

The Renaudot win adds to a literary career that has already brought Désérable major recognition in France. A former professional ice hockey player, he won the Grand prix du roman de l’Académie française in 2021 for Mon maître et mon vainqueur. In 2023, he received the Prix Nicolas Bouvier for L’usure du monde, a travel narrative about Iran. Those earlier awards established him as a writer able to move between fiction and nonfiction, and between intimate subjects and broader historical or cultural settings.

This year’s Renaudot prizes in other categories were also announced on Tuesday, November 3. The Renaudot Essai was awarded jointly to Jean-Paul Enthoven for Dictionnaire amoureux du bonheur and Christophe Ono-dit-Biot for L’Odyssée de l’Odyssée. The Renaudot Poche went to journalist Jean-Christophe Buisson for Complètement à l’Est !.

The Prix Renaudot is one of France’s best-known literary awards and is closely watched by the publishing industry each fall. Désérable’s victory with a novel about wine gives this year’s prize a distinctly Burgundian theme while reinforcing the place of food, drink and specialized knowledge as material for serious contemporary fiction.