French author Jean-Marie Le Clezio seen at the Lonorore Airport in Vanuatu, South Pacific.

French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, whose vast world travels form the poetic backdrop for his body of work, Thursday won the 2008 Nobel Literature Prize.

“I am very moved and touched. It’s a great honor for me,” he told Swedish public radio after the Swedish Academy announced this year’s laureate. “I’m sincerely grateful to the Nobel Academy.”

The newest Nobel laureate is one of the French writers best known outside his country and one of the most wide-ranging in his choice of subject matters.

The Academy cited his novel “Revolutions” from 2003 as summing up “the most important themes of his work: memory, exile, the reorientations of youth, cultural conflict.”

“The emphasis in Le Clezio’s work has increasingly moved in the direction of an exploration of the world of childhood and of his own family history,” it added.

Peripatetic soul

Le Clezio is an avid traveler, and his fiction is as likely to be set in Mexico or the Sahara as in Paris or London.

With his first novel, Le Proces-Verbal (The Interrogation), published when he was only 23, Le Clezio was seen as a newcomer to the Nouveau Roman (New Novel) movement spearheaded by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

But he defied easy classification and rapidly became a cult author, a lonely chronicler - rarely given to making public statements - of the perils of modern life, particularly in its urban variety.

A passionate admirer of two other great travelers, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, Le Clezio’s novel Le Proces-Verbal in 1963 won the Renaudot award, France’s second most prestigious literary award after the Goncourt prize.

His latest work Ritournelle de la faim (Same Old Story about Hunger) released this year has been hailed as breaking new ground, exploring French guilt over its wartime past.

“Jean-Marie Le Clezio is a great French monument who towers over our literature,” said critic Franz-Olivier Giesbert.

“You must get close to the statue to discover a warm multi-talented writer, who explores just about every genre, from the most modest to the most daring,” he said.

Among the better-known of his more than 20 novels are La Guerre (War) “Mondo,” “Desert,” Le Chercheur d’Or (The Prospector), “Onitsha,” and Etoile Errante (Wandering Star).

“Wandering Star” and “Onitsha” are among the works that have been translated into English.

Le Clezio was born in the Riviera city of Niceon April 13, 1940 to an English father and French mother.

His family had roots in both Brittany and the Indian Ocean island state of Mauritius.

He went on to study literature, and taught briefly at the universities of London and Bristol.

In the late 1960s he traveled to Mexico and Panama where he spent several months among the Emberas Indians.

It was, he later said, “an experience which changed my life, my ideas about life and art, ways of being with others, of walking, eating, sleeping, loving and even dreaming.”

His fascination with other ways of life has led some critics to describe his work as “metaphysical fiction,” a kind of questioning of traditional forms of being.

“I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that,” he said. “If I had to venture into philosophy, I’d say I was a poor Rousseauist who hasn’t really figured it out.”

Earlier this year, he won Sweden’s Stig Dagerman literary prize, a distinction he shares with Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek who took the honors in 2004 before going on to win the Nobel later the same year.

In 1994, the readers of the French literary review Lire voted him “the greatest living French-language writer.”

Le Clezio divides his time mainly between Mexico and his home in Nice.

The French author will receive the Nobel diploma, medal and a check for 10 million kronor (US$1.42 million) at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.

Last year, the prize went to British writer Doris Lessing.

Source: AFP