Nobel Prize 2008

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the French novelist and poet Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. The Nobel Committee praised him as an ‘author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization’.

Le Clézio published his first novel, Le procès-verbal (The Interrogation) in 1963, when he was twenty-three years old. He was the first recipient of the French Academy’s Grand Prix Paul Morand in 1980 for his novel Désert, which ‘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’.

His most recent books include Ritournelle de la faim, published by Gallimard this year, and Ballaciner which was described by the Swedish Academy as ‘a deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film 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’.

Last week the Permanent Secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, Horace Engdahl, caused consternation when he criticized American writers for their insularity and ignorance. ‘They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,’ he said. No doubt many in the English-speaking world, where Le Clézio is not much read, are now trying to catch up with the conversation.

See also:
Not every writer wants to win the Nobel Prize
And the Nobel Goes To...