Vincent Delecroix, born in Paris in 1969, is a French philosopher and novelist who teaches at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and is best known in academic circles for his work on Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher whose writing on guilt, anxiety, and the relationship between a single self and the moral law underwrites much of Small Boat. Before Naufrage (the original French title of Small Boat), Delecroix won the Prix Valery Larbaud for Ce qui est perdu (2006) and the Académie Française’s Grand prix de littérature for Tombeau d’Achille (2008). Naufrage was longlisted for the 2023 Prix Goncourt, one of France’s most prestigious literary honors, and shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize in Helen Stevenson’s English translation.

Delecroix’s Kierkegaard scholarship leads him to the question of how a person justifies herself before her own conscience. In works like Fear and Trembling (1843) and Either/Or (1843), Kierkegaard explores the essential question of how individuals can become moral authorities over their own lives rather than uncritically accepting the authority of others, a question that drives the narrator of Small Boat as she struggles to make peace with her own moral choices.