WASHINGTON — French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has won the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Swedish Academy, in announcing the award Thursday, called Le Clezio an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”
Le Clezio, 68, is the author of more than 30 novels, essays, story collections and translations. The academy cited his breakthrough novel as “Desert,” published in 1980, which it described as containing “magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants.”
The 2008 award came in an atmosphere of controversy created last month by Horace Eng dahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel committee for literature, who told The Associated Press that American literature is “too isolated, too insular,” and American writers “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.”
Engdahl praised Le Clezio’s non-insularity.
“He is a great writer of variety,” Engdahl said, who “has come to include other civilizations, other modes of thought, other modes of living than the Western in his writing.”
Asked to recommend one book for someone coming to Le Clezio’s writing for the first time, Engdahl suggested the autobiographical 2003 novel “Revolutions.” The Nobel award, which comes with $1.4 million, will be presented to Le Clezio in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
