The judges of France’s most prestigious literary prize omitted an author from its shortlist because of antisemitic drawings he published in a student magazine when he was younger.
Yann Moix’s novel Orleans had been widely tipped as a candidate for this year’s Goncourt Prize.
But shortly after its publication last month, the French magazine L’Express uncovered antisemitic drawings and texts he had produced in his youth.
Mr Moix said this week that he was now “ashamed” of them.
“These texts and these drawings are antisemitic, but I am not an antisemite,” he told the newspaper Liberation.
“The whole journey I have made since then, my journey as a man, is the story of someone who has tried to escape this toxic geography, to extract myself from this trap,” he said.
Bernard Pivot, president of the academy which awards the prize, explained the judges feared being accused of “promoting explained if the author had been included on the shortlist.
Mr Pivot also explained that some judges thought the second part of the novel worse than the first and he was concerned, too, by family controversy over the autiobiographical story as Mr Moix’s father and brother have the novelist’s account of incidents in his childhood.
