Yann Moix

Yann Moix was born on 31 March 1968 in Nevers, France.[1][2] He earned a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, and he graduated from the École supérieure de commerce de Reims.[2] He subsequently graduated from Sciences Po.[2]

Moix is the author of several novels. He won the Prix Goncourt for debut novel as well as the Prix François Mauriac from the Académie française for Jubilations vers le ciel in 1996.[3][4] In 2013, he won the Prix Renaudot for Naissance.[3][5]

Moix directed three films, including Podium, based on one of his novels.[2] Since 2015, Moix has been a columnist on On n'est pas couché, a television program.[2] He also writes for the magazine La Règle du Jeu.[6]

In January 2019, Moix's comments about women over 50 caused outrage on social media in France. In an interview with the French edition of the women's magazine Marie Claire, Moix declared that women in their 50s were “invisible” to him and that he preferred "younger women's bodies." He further added that he preferred dating Asian women, particularly Koreans, Chinese and Japanese.[7]

In August 2019, his latest novel Orléans was published to critical acclaim, but leaving critics and the public bewildered about the revelations it contains. The book, despite being presented as a novel, is made to look heavily autobiographical, leading the public to think that Yann Moix actually endured as a young boy what the narrator goes through. The book is evidently laced with hate for the narrator's parents, with Moix positionning himself between the lines as a real-life long-suffering victim, who finally dares to tell the truth. Following public protests by Yann Moix' parents and younger brother, it eventually transpired that some of the severe incidents he describes actually took place between him and his brother, who is not mentioned in the book, with Yann Moix as the tormentor, and that several of the revolting situations were in fact made up, "heavily exaggerated". His brother Alexandre Moix, today also a writer and film producer, whose first book the publication of which Yann Moix had apparently tried to block on the grounds that "there can only be one Moix, MOI!" [him], told media that his elder "prefers to serve his own ambition rather than the truth". He also refuses that his older brother should be a flag-bearer for suffering children, since "he doesn't care about other people's suffering".[8]

Right in the middle of this controversy, the French magazine L'Express revealed on 26 August 2019 that Yann Moix, who has always positioned himself as a staunch defender of the Jewish cause and of ill-treated minorities at large, as a student contributed to a negationnist, anti-semitic self-styled magazine. At first, Moix recognised having made the drawings it contained, but strongly denied having written any of these vile, extremely offensive texts, saying that he had merely copied what his fellow editors had composed "since his handwriting was the best of the lot". The following day, L'Express unearthed a document in which the same texts appear, presumably drafts for the magazine, signed by Yann Moix himself, including a short story about a Jew trying to bargain the price of his train ticket to Buchenwald. Moix relented, admitting that he wrote the texts, saying that today they make him "want to puke", that he never was anti-semitic, just filled with hate for himself, and that all his life as a grown man, he had worked hard to run away from "these toxic geographies", feeling "liberated" now that the story had come out.[9]

• Yann Moix at IMDb