When the French novelist Patrick Modiano won the Nobel prize for literature this month, the international reaction could be summed up in two words: who he?

France’s ambitious new culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, apparently shares that view. Despite telling a television interviewer that she had enjoyed a “wonderful” lunch with the author, she was unable to name any of his books.

Since making the embarrassing admission on Sunday, Pellerin, 41, has been pilloried on social media.

Pellerin told the Canal+ presenter, who had asked her to identify her favourite Modiano book: “I’ve no problem in confessing that I’ve not had any time to read for the past two years. I read a lot of notes, a lot of legislative texts, news, AFP stories, but I read very little.”

She visibly squirmed, however, when it was pointed out to her that it was “important to read” in her job.

Commentator Claude Askolovitch wrote on Huffington Post France on Monday that after happily admitting that she read very little, the minister should have resigned.

Pellerin, born in South Korea but adopted by a French family when she was six months, is a high achiever who has never made a secret of her ambition to take over the coveted post of culture minister from her rival Aurélie Filipetti.

From May 2012, Pellerin served as a junior minister in charge of the digital economy. Last May, she was responsible for foreign trade when Filipetti humiliated her by making her enter the Cannes film festival through a back entrance rather than taking the red carpet. So her appointment as culture minister in August was widely seen as Pellerin’s revenge.

In a profile in Le Figaro after her appointment, Pellerin said her favourite books were Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and Casanova in Bolzano by the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai. She did not, however, mention Modiano.