According to translator and journalist Nils C. Ahl, the fact that Jančar's novel was short-listed for the 2012 prize is very strange, considering that the Slovenian author received the European Prize for Literature in 2011 and is considered one of the greatest contemporary Slovenian authors.

Despite all this, Jančar's "Headnoise", a story about a violent revolt, heroic and funny, triggered by an interruption in the transmission of a basketball game, went unnoticed by the French media, Ahl said.

"The novel is magnificently insightful, and it takes a hand of a master to create something like that - but the whole thing works nevertheless, everything is beautifully balanced. A great writer, I tell you," Ahl commented on Jančar's work.

The Prix de l'Inapercu was first conferred in 2008 and since then every May a French and a foreign author receive it for literary prose, the Modrian publishing house said.

"Headnoise", Jančar's fifth novel, was published in French last year by Passage du Nord-Ouest. It is also his fifth novel to be translated into French.

The novel earned Jančar the Kresnik Prize for best novel of the year in 1999, while director Andrej Košak made a namesake film based on the novel in 2002.