French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008, announced Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.
"The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2008 is awarded to the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization". Engdahl made the announcement in Stockholm on Thursday.
In a live interview broadcast by the Nobel Prize website, Engdahl described Le Clezio as a nomadic person.
"He is not a typical French writer, he is outside the western culture. He is nomadic by traveling to Africa and later to Mexico and many other places…. He is a little bit utopia which I like." Said Engdahl.
According to the press release from the Academy, Le Clézio was born on April 13, 1940, in Nice, but both parents had strong family connections with the former French colony, Mauritius in Southern Africa.
At the age of eight, Le Clézio and his family moved to Nigeria, where the father had been stationed as a doctor during the Second World War. During the month-long voyage to Nigeria, he began his literary career with two books, Un long voyage and Oradi noir.
He grew up with two languages, French and English. In 1950 the family returned to Nice. He took a master's degree at the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1964 and wrote a doctoral thesis on Mexico's early history at the University of Perpignan in 1983.
He has taught at universities in Bangkok, Mexico City, Boston, and Austin among other places.
Le Clézio received much attention with his first novel, Le procès-verbal (1963; The Interrogation, 1964). As a young writer, he was influenced by existentialism and "tried to lift words above the degenerate state of everyday speech and to restore to them the power to invoke an essential reality".
His debut novel was the first in a series of descriptions of crisis, which includes the short story collection La fièvre (1965; Fever, 1966) and Le déluge (1966; The Flood, 1967), in which he points out the trouble and fear reigning in the major Western cities.
Even early on Le Clézio stood out as an ecologically engaged author, an orientation that is accentuated with the novels Terra amata (1967; Terra Amata, 1969), La guerre (1970; War, 1973) and Les géants (1973; The Giants, 1975).
His breakthrough as a novelist came with Désert (1980), for which he received a prize from the French Academy. This work contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants.
In the 1990s and after 2000, Le Clézio's work has increasingly moved in the direction of exploring his childhood and his own family history. This development began with Onitsha (1991), continued more explicitly with La quarantaine (1995) and has culminated in Révolutions (2003) and L'Africain (2004). Révolutions sums up the most important themes of his work: memory, exile, the reorientations of youth and cultural conflict.
Among Le Clézio's most recent works are Ballaciner (2007), a deeply personal essay about the film history and the importance of film in the author's life, from the hand-turned projectors of his childhood, the cult of cinéaste trends in his teens, to his adult forays into the art of film as developed in unfamiliar parts of the world. A new work, Ritournelle de la faim, has just been published.
Le Clézio has also written several books for children and youth.
Overall, he is a versatile writer and has written more than 40 books which have been translated into English, German and Swedish.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is 10 million Swedish kronor and about 1.42 million US dollars.
The prize issuing ceremony will be held on December 10th.
By Xuefei Chen People's Daily Online correspondent in Stockholm.
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