France's Le Clezio wins Nobel in literature

France's Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature yesterday for works characterized by "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" and focused on the environment, especially the desert.

Le Clezio, 68, is the first French writer to win the prestigious award since Chinese-born Frenchman Gao Xingjian was honored in 2000.

The decision was in line with the Swedish Academy's recent picks of European authors. Last year's prize went to Doris Lessing of Britain.

The academy 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 made his breakthrough as a novelist with Desert, in 1980, a work the academy said "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".

That novel, which also won Le Clezio a prize from the French Academy, is considered a masterpiece. It describes the ordeal of Lalla, a woman from the Tuareg nomadic tribe of the Sahara Desert, as she adapts to civilization imposed by colonial France at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Swedish Academy said Le Clezio from early on "stood out as an ecologically engaged author, an orientation that is accentuated with the novels Terra Amata, The Book of Flights, War and The Giants."

Le Clezio has spent much of his time living in New Mexico in recent years. He has long shied away from public life, spending much of his time traveling, often in the deserts worldwide.

He has published several dozen books, including novels and essays. The most famous are tales of nomads, meditations on the desert and childhood memories. He has also explored the mythologies of native Americans, who have long fascinated him.

Academy Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl called Le Clezio a writer of great diversity.

"He has gone through many different phases of his development as a writer and has come to include other civilizations, other modes of living than the Western, in his writing," Engdahl said.

Appearing on France Inter radio yesterday to promote a new book shortly before the prize was announced, Le Clezio was asked if he thought he might win a possible Nobel.

"Sure, why not," he replied. "When you're a writer you always believe in literary prizes."

Le Clezio said a Nobel "was something that makes you rebound, that gives you the desire to keep writing ... We write to be read, we write to have responses, and that is a response."

In an interview with news magazine Label France in 2001, Le Clezio said literature was a "means of reminding people of this tragedy and bringing it back to center stage".

Le Clezio was quoted as saying that "when I write I am primarily trying to translate my relationship to the everyday, to events".

Le Clezio was born in Nice in 1940 and at eight the family moved to Nigeria, where his father had been a doctor during World War II. They returned to France in 1950.

One of his most recent works is 2007's Ballaciner, a work the academy called a "deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film and the importance of film" in his life.

Questions:

1. Who was the last French writer to win this prize?

2. What was Le Clezio’s breakthrough novel?

3. What are some of the themes in his books?

Answers:

1. Chinese-born Frenchman Gao Xingjian, in 2000.

2. Desert, in 1980.

3. The desert, other civilizations, childhood memories.