Paris (AFP)

The writer and Nobel Prize winner in literature Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio will leave the jury for the Renaudot Prize, a literary prize questioned for having rewarded the pedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff in 2013.

"I will follow" Jérôme Garcin, the journalist who resigned from Renaudot in early March, said JMG Le Clézio to Le Figaro.

The writer said that he "strongly" opposed the awarding of the prize to Matzneff in 2013. "They didn't listen to me," he said.

"Séraphin, c'est la fin!", The book for which Matzneff received the Renaudot Prize is "an apology for rape", estimated the Nobel Prize in Literature. "I read it with great disgust," he insisted.

Like Jérôme Garcin, he wanted the Renaudot jury to be feminized.

Composed of ten members, the Renaudot jury currently has only one woman, Dominique Bona.

The Renaudot Prize, one of the great literary prizes of the fall, was caught up in the turmoil of the Matzneff affair, after the publication in early January of an autobiographical novel by the editor Vanessa Springora ("Le consent"), in which she denounces the ravages of her relationship under the influence of the writer, a claimed pedophile, in the 1980s. She was barely 14 years old and he was almost 50 years old.

Targeted by an investigation for rape of minors, Gabriel Matzneff will be tried in September 2021 for "apology" for pedophilia.

Nearly three months after the publication of "Consent", another teenage woman who had a grieving relationship with Gabriel Matzneff, Francesca Gee, emerged from silence on Tuesday, interviewing the New York Times.

© 2020 AFP