French author excluded from top prize over antisemitic drawings he did in his youth

“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.