Stockholm - French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has won this year's Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm on Thursday.
2008 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio speaks during his press conference at the Gallimar Publishing House in Paris, France, 09 October 2008, the same day the award was announced by the Nobel Committee in Sweden. EPA/LUCAS DOLEGA
Le Clezio, 68, said he was 'very moved and grateful,' he told Swedish radio's arts section, minutes after the announcement.
He added that he had been at work writing when the academy contacted him Thursday with the news.
The academy cited him as an 'author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, an explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.'
Permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it was 'a fun selection,' adding that the academy had eyed Le Clezio 'for a long time.'
'It was fun to return to France, a major literary nation that has not been on the Nobel agenda since 1985,' Engdahl said on Swedish television, referring to Claude Simon who preceded Le Clezio.
Le Clezio was born April 13, 1940, in Nice. Roughly a dozen of his some 40 works have been translated into English. The most recent translation was The Wandering Star: A novel.
Engdahl said Le Clezio had produced a major body of work with many vantage points.
Le Clezio grew up with two languages, French and English, the academy said, noting that he as a child he moved with his family to Nigeria where his father worked as a doctor.
He made his literary debut in 1963 with The Interrogation, the 'first in a series of descriptions of crisis,' the academy said.
The book won the Prix Renaudot.
Other themes in his writing touch on ecology - for instance in Terra Amata, The Book of Flights, and War.
Extended visits to Mexico and Central America influenced essay collections like Mydriase and Hai, and also appeared in the 1975 novel Voyage de l'Autre Cote.
In recent years he has explored his own family history and childhood. His family hails from Mauritius, and the islands of the Indian Ocean feature in the 1993 work The Prospector while his family history is outlined in works like Onitsha, Revolutions and L'Africain.
Engdahl recommended prospective readers of the new laureate to start with Revolutions from 2003, a work that deals with issues like memory, exile, youth and cultural conflict.
The award is worth 10 million kronor (1.5 million dollars).
The literature prize is one of the awards endowed by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. Earlier this week awards for medicine, physics and chemistry were announced.
French poet and philosopher Sully Prudhomme was in 1901 the first winner of the Nobel literature prize.
On Friday, the peace prize is to be announced in Oslo.
The economic sciences prize - a prize not endowed by Nobel and awarded since 1968 - is scheduled to be announced Monday.
The award ceremonies are held December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's 1896 death in San Remo, Italy.
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