The dean of the Renaudot Prize jury, Louis Gardel, announced on Thursday that he was stepping down to make way for a younger person.
"I told my friends at Renaudot that soon to be 82 it seemed wise to me to resign," said the writer in a press release sent to AFP by his editor, Le Seuil.
"I was the youngest member, I had become the dean, always with the same attachment and the same pleasure", he confides.
The impartiality of jurors called into question
Le Renaudot, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in France, was the subject of its 2020 edition of severe journalistic investigations by the daily newspapers
Le Monde
and the
New York Times
, which called into question the impartiality of its jurors.
Louis Gardel alluded to this context which, he says, is not what prompted him to leave.
“I had planned to do it earlier.
I preferred to wait so that this resignation is not interpreted as a defection at the time of the attacks suffered by the jury, ”he wrote.
The author of "Fort Saganne"
The list of this prize remains marred by the attribution of the 2013 essay prize to a collection of articles by Gabriel Matzneff, Séraphin, c'est la fin !.
After the scandal sparked by
Le Consentement
, where Vanessa Springora recounts her adolescent relationship in the 1980s with the writer who was then approaching 50, one of the jurors, Frédéric Beigbeder, said that the prize had been awarded in part by " compassion ”for a man living on little income.
Louis Gardel, a native of Algiers, is best known for
Fort Saganne
(1980), a novel about colonial Algeria and the Sahara at the start of the 20th century, which was adapted for cinema.
Books
Matzneff affair: A juror from Renaudot "regrets the harm that this prize has caused"
Books
Matzneff affair: A juror from Renaudot "regrets the harm that this prize has caused"
Renaudot Prize
Literature
Culture