Le Clezio wins Nobel Prize for Literature
14th French writer honoured by Swedish Academy
9 October 2008
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2008 has been awarded to the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. The announcement was made by Professor Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, today 9 October 2008.
68-year-old Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio was hailed by the Swedish Academy as "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation".
Le Clezio is the 14th French writer to win since the prize began in 1901. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Satre were also awarded the prestigious prize, though Satre famously declined it in 1964.
Le Clezio's breakthrough novel was Desert in 1980, a work the Swedish Academy praised for its "magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert." It goes on to describe his most recent work Ballaciner (2007) as a "deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film".
The winner receives 10m Swedish Krona (£815,000), to be awarded at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 2008.
Le Clezio succeeds the English writer Doris Lessing, who has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize and has twice been a contender for the Man Booker Prize International.
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