Madrid - The Spanish edition of the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia on Thursday erroneously said French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio had died of a heart attack on hearing that he had won the literature Nobel Prize.

"On hearing the news, because of the surprise, he suffered a heart attack and was taken in critical condition to the Charles de Gaulle hospital in Paris, where he died at 1.05 pm," the Wikipedia entry on Le Clezio said.

The joke was eliminated from Wikipedia two minutes after it had appeared, but its author reintroduced it, adding that French President Nicolas Sarkozy had expressed his condolences to Le Clezio's family.

The second text was also corrected immediately by Wikipedia. 

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has won this year's Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm on Thursday.

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.