French Novelist Wins Nobel Prize
Printer-friendly versionOn Thursday, October 9, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, a French novelist, children's author, and essayist, was named the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature. The Swedish Academy described Le Clezio as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure, and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
Le Clezio's first novel, Le proces-verbal, was published in 1963 (The Interrogation, 1964). The Swedish Academy noted that as a young writer, Le Clezio, who was born in 1940 in Nice, served as a "conjurer who tried to lift words above the degenerate state of everyday speech and to restore to them the power to invoke an essential reality." Le proces-verbal was the first in a series about crises, including the 1965 short story collection La fievre (Fever, 1966) and Le deluge in 1966 (The Flood, 1967).
Describing Le Clezio as an "ecologically engaged author," the Swedish Academy noted the novels Terra amata (1967; Terra Amata, 1969), Le livre des fuites (1969; The Book of Flights, 1971), La guerre (1970; War, 1973) and Les geants (1973; The Giants, 1975), and said his definitive breakthrough came with Desert (1980), for which he received a prize from the French Academy.
Le Clezio's other works include several books for children and young adults, meditative essays, and more recently explorations of the world of childhood and of his own family history. The latter includes 2007's Ballaciner, an essay about the history of the art of film and the importance of film in the author's life, and the just-published Ritournelle de la faim.
Le Celzio is the recipient of the Prix Theophraste Renaudot (1963), Prix Larbaud (1972), Grand Prix Paul Morand de l'Academie francaise (1980), Grand Prix Jean Giono (1997), Prix Prince de Monaco (1998), and Stig Dagermanpriset (2008).
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The bibliography of Le Clezio's works in English, from the Nobel Prize website, includes: The Interrogation, translated from the French by Daphne Woodward. New York: Atheneum, 1964. Translation of Le proces-verbal Fever, translated from the French by Daphne Woodward. New York: Atheneum, 1966. Translation of La fievre The Flood, translated from the French by Peter Green. London: H. Hamilton, 1967. Translation of Le deluge Terra Amata, translated from the French by Barbara Bray. London: Hamilton, 1969; New York: Atheneum, 1969. Translation of Terra amata The Book of Flights: An Adventure Story, translated from the French by Simon Watson Taylor. London: Cape, 1971; New York: Atheneum, 1972. Translation of Le livre des fuites War, translated from the French by Simon Watson Taylor. London: Cape, 1973; New York: Atheneum, 1973. Translation of La guerre The Giants, translated from the French by Simon Watson Taylor. London: Cape, 1975; New York: Atheneum, 1975. Translation of Les geants The Mexican Dream, or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Translation of Le reve mexicain ou la pensee interrompue The Prospector, translated from the French by Carol Marks. Boston: David R. Godine, 1993. Translation of Le chercheur d'or Onitsha, translated by Alison Anderson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Translation of Onitsha The Round & Other Cold Hard Facts, translated by C. Dickson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Translation of La ronde et autres faits divers Wandering Star: a Novel, translated by C. Dickson. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2004. Translation of Etoile errante |