Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, a French successful novelist, children’s author and essayist was awarded The 2008 Nobel Prize for literature by The Swedish Academy. The Nobel Prize committee regards the 68-year-old writer "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization." The thing is that he is the first French citizen to receive the prize since Gao Xingjian in 2000, and the first French-language writer to win since Claude Simon in 1985.

The Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, recently said that Europe was “the center of the literary world,” and suggested that American writers were too much under the sway of American popular culture to win. The last American writer to receive the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993.

A great traveler, Le Clezio has been writing since age seven or eight. The author now divides his time traveling between Albuquerque, New Mexico, his family's native Mauritius, and the French city of Nice, where he grew up.

After majoring in French literature, he became famous at 23 with his first novel, “Le Procès-Verbal.” The novel won Le Clezio the prestigious Theophraste Renaudot prize when he was just 23. But he had his first big success with the book "Desert" in 1980. A lyrical, occasionally hallucinatory work, it deals with the marginalized but still fundamentally vital lives of African nomads, as contrasted with the bleakness of modern urban European life.

Born in Nice in 1940, Le Clezio spent two years as a child in Nigeria and has taught in universities in Bangkok, Boston and Mexico City.

Le Clezio has written about 30 books including novels, essays, and short stories.

The thing is that Le Clezio was asked in an interview with Tirthankar Chanda for Label France magazine back in 2001 what he would say if he was awarded the Nobel Prize. "That's a very hypothetical question! I don't know for the Nobel Prize but I know what I would like to talk about publicly. I would like to talk about the war that kills children," he said. He is reluctant to identify himself strictly as a Frenchman. "I started in France, but my father was a British citizen, born in Mauritius. So I see myself as a mix, like many people currently in Europe."

His most recent works include “Ballaciner,” a work the academy called a "deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film," and “Ritournelle de la faim,” which has just been published.

“I am very moved, very touched,” Le Clezio told Swedish public radio. “It’s a great honor for me.” The Nobel award, which comes with a check for $1.4 million, will be presented to Le Clezio in Stockholm on December 10.