Born in Paris in 1969, Vincent Delecroix trained at the École normale supérieure and became an agrégé of philosophy. He specialises in Søren Kierkegaard, the subject of his doctoral thesis, and serves as director of studies in the philosophy of religion at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He has published ten philosophy books and eight works of fiction.
His novels and short stories attend to existential acts: love, singing, the sacred. La chaussure sur le toit (2007) strings together ten short stories, each built on the same small image, a shoe placed on the roof of the building opposite in Paris. Ce qui est perdu won the Prix Valery Larbaud, and Tombeau d'Achille (2008) received the Grand prix de littérature de l'Académie française.
Naufrage, published in 2023, was longlisted for the Prix Goncourt. Its English translation, Small Boat, appeared in 2025 with Hope Road Publishing in Helen Stevenson's translation, and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It is the first of Delecroix's novels to appear in English. The novella is built on the November 2021 English Channel disaster in which migrants died when their inflatable dinghy capsized. The narrator is the radio operator who received the distress calls, and she refuses to be held more responsible than the political and bureaucratic systems that produced the catastrophe. Delecroix has called it a fiction about how an ordinary person can become, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, an example of the banality of evil.
Small Boat is the natural first book. It is short, urgent, and its philosophical questions arrive through a concrete, harrowing situation. For a quieter, more playful introduction to Delecroix's range, La chaussure sur le toit shows his gift for building meaning around a single object.
