After being eliminated in the final selection for the “Prix Goncourt”, Yanick Lahens’ novel “Passagères de nuit”, published on August 28, 2025, by Sabine Wespieser éditeur, won the “Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française” on October 30, 2025. This award is one of the most prestigious in the French-speaking literary world and comes with a prize of €10,000.
In this fiction set in the 19th century, the 72-year-old Haitian writer pays tribute to the courage of the line of women to which she belongs, notably her great-grandmother and her grandmother, one from New Orleans (United States) and the other from Port-au-Prince (Haiti).
Yanick Lahens, who had to leave Haiti to live with her brother in Miami because of the terror of gangs, was unable to attend the ceremony in Paris in order to receive his award for administrative reasons. “I thank you for this distinction that your prestigious institution has decided to confer on me (…) I wanted to make audible yet powerful voices of women who have been silenced. Literature teaches us that no place in the world can be considered peripheral. That the human condition exists everywhere, in abysmal darkness and bright lights (…) I am a writer who, in her solitude and discretion, constantly questions and doubts, and moves forward by trial and error, hesitantly, in a world that, although it has always daily nourished me, is now shaking up my old landmarks (…)”, said Yanick Lahens in a recorded speech.
Haitian author is a regular at literary awards. Indeed, on November 3, 2014, she received the “Prix Femina” (whose jury is composed entirely of women) for her ninth novel, “Bain de Lune” (Sabine Wespieser éditeur). In 2013, her book “Guillaume et Nathalie” (Sabine Wespieser éditeur) received the “Prix Caraïbes”. In 2009, she was awarded the “Prix Littéraire Richelieu de la Francophonie” for her novel “La couleur de l’aube” (Sabine Wespieser éditeur). The same novel also won the “Prix Millepages” in 2008.
