Frenchman Le Clézio wins Nobel prize in literature

FRANCE’s Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the 2008 Nobel prize in literature yesterday for works characterised by “poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy” and focused on the environment, especially the desert.

The award is usually made to honour a writer’s entire literary output, which in Le Clézio’s case extends to 43 novels, short story collections and volumes of essays.

The Academy has praised Le Clézio as “an author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation”.