Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins Nobel Prize for Literature 2008

PARIS — The Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded the 2008 Nobel Prizefor literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a cosmopolitan and prolific French novelist, children’s author and essayist regarded by many French readers and critics as one of the country’s greatest living writers.

Bertrand Guay/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

Related

From the Archives: Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature (October 12, 2006)

Times Topics: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

Times Topics: Nobel Prizes

Citation by The Swedish Academy(nobelprize.org)

Mr. Le Clézio has written more than 40 books, 12 of which have been translated into English, an exotic canon of novels, essays and children’s books depicted by the academy as distilled from experience in Mexico, Central America and North Africa and suffused with a quest for lost culture and new spiritual realities.

In its citation, the prize committee in Stockholm called him an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” The prize, won last year by the British author Doris Lessing, was worth $1.43 million.
“I am very moved, very touched,” Mr. Le Clézio told Swedish public radio. “It’s a great honor for me.”
While his work is inflected with international experience, Mr. Le Clézio, 68, is the 14th French writer to win the prize since it was created in 1901, and the 12th European author to win since 1994, indicative of a trend that has become a matter of heated debate.
The Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, recently said that Europe was “the center of the literary world,” and suggested that American writers were too insular and too much under the sway of American popular culture to win. The last American writer to receive the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993.


more