The Académie Goncourt unveiled the winners of its Spring Prizes on May 5, 2026. Among the laureates is René Depestre, to whom the jury awarded the Goncourt Poetry Prize – Robert Sabatier for his entire body of poetic work. A major distinction for one of the most important writers in Haitian and French-speaking literature.

Born in Jacmel, René Depestre lived through the twentieth century as both an engaged witness and an unclassifiable poet. Forced into exile under the dictatorship of François Duvalier, he lived successively in Cuba and in Europe before eventually settling in France, where he has resided since the 1980s. This path of exile, far from silencing his voice, nourished it with a singular energy blending Negritude, surrealism, sensuality, and political resistance.