Fictionalizing the Greatest Humanitarian Challenge of Our Times

Small Boat is the recently published English translation of Vincent Delecroix’s French novel Naufrage (2023). This is a compelling novel on one of the biggest humanitarian challenges of present times—the global refugee crisis. With it being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in April 2025, Small Boat gained significant traction in the global literary landscape and justifiably so. This is a fictional account based on a tragic incident of migrants drowning in the English Channel in November 2021. Twenty-seven migrants, including women and children, lost their lives in the Channel during a desperate attempt to reach the United Kingdom from France in an inflatable dinghy in the middle of the night. Though this incident was not an isolated one—given that thousands of hapless migrants risk their lives on a daily basis attempting to cross the treacherous English Channel, as reported by the United Nations—it was considered one of the deadliest at the time, and subsequently catalysed conversations on issues of migrant crisis and rehabilitation. It is this specific incident in 2021 which Delecroix centres in his fictional account, although from an ingenious narrative perspective, to segue into larger questions on individual and structural responses to contemporary refugee crises and the inherent moral dubiousness.