France’s spirits rose yesterday when Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a half-British novelist and one of the country’s most internationally acclaimed writers, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Swedish Academy called Le Clézio an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, an explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation”.

The award to the cosmopolitan, Mauritius-raised Le Clézio, 68, was the second Nobel honour for France this week. Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barre-Sinouss shared the medicine prize with the German Harald zur Hausen for their discovery of the HIV virus.

Since Jean-Paul Sartre dramatically declined the award in 1964 — declaring that “a writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution” — only two other French writers have won the literature prize, Claude Simon in 1985 and the Chinese-born Gao Xingjian in 2000.

France had not won two Nobels in the same year since 1952, when Albert Schweitzer won for peace and François Mauriac for literature.

President Sarkozy hailed Le Clézio for bringing honour to France, a country that has been worried for the past two decades that its culture has been declining.

“A great traveller, he embodies the influence of France, its culture and its values in a globalised world,” the President said. “A child in Mauritius and Nigeria, a teenager in Nice, a nomad of the American and African deserts, Jean-Marie Le Clézio is a citizen of the world, the son of all continents and cultures.”

The decision to recognise Le Clézio was in line with the Swedish Academy’s recent taste for European authors, leading up to last year’s prize for Doris Lessing.

Le Clézio, whose work is inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson and other great adventure novelists, achieved fame at 23 when he won the prestigious Renaudot prize with Le Procès Verbal, a novel in the avant-garde nouveau roman style of the time. This was published in English in 1964 as The Interrogation.

He made an international breakthrough in 1980 with Desert. The Nobel Academy said that the work “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”.

Le Clézio, who was born in Nice and has lived in England, New Mexico and South Korea, said that he was touched by the honour. He mentioned his British father, a surgeon, and his childhood in Mauritius and Nigeria. “I was born of a mix, like many people currently in Europe,” he said.

Hours before the award, Le Clézio said that a Nobel “was something that makes you rebound, that gives you the desire to keep writing”.

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