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”.

Le Clézio will be invited to deliver a lecture at the prize-giving banquet in Stockholm on December 10, where he will be awarded a gold medal, a Nobel diploma and a cheque for €1.02 million.

Le Clézio was born in Nice in 1940. Both his parents had strong family connections with the former French colony, Mauritius. At the age of eight, he moved with his family to Nigeria, where his father served as a doctor.

In 1950, the family returned to Nice. He studied English at Bristol University from 1958-59, completing his degree at the Institut d’Etudes Litteraires in Nice in 1963. He was awarded a master’s degree at the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1964, and a doctorate at the University of Perignan in 1983.

Le Clézio has taught at universities in Bangkok, Mexico City, Boston, Austin and Albuquerque.

He published his first novel Le Proces-verbal (The Interrogation) in 1963. It focused on the terrors of living in a modern city, a subject he revisited in subsequent works. His breakthrough novel was Desert (The Desert), published in 1980, which won him a prestigious prize from the French Academy. The book centred on the experiences of an immigrant Algerian worker in France.

Le Clézio is known for his ecological concerns, and for his engagement with the cultures of Mexico, Central America and India. He and his Moroccan wife, Jemia, divide their time between homes in New Mexico, Mauritius and Nice.

In recent years, he has turned to themes of childhood and his family history.

He is the 14th French author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the first French citizen to win since Gao Xingjian in 2000 and the first French language writer since Claude Simon in 1965.

Four Irish writers have won the prize: William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney.