Smash hit

He has written more than 20 novels, including La Guerre (1970), Mondo (1978), Le Chercheur d’Or (1985), Onitsha (1991) and Étoile Errante (1992). His latest, Ritournelle de la Faim (Same Old Story about Hunger), published this year, explores French guilt over the country’s record under German occupation in the Second World War.

Horace Engdahl, the academy’s secretary, said that Le Clézio had “gone through many different phases of his development . . . and has come to include other civilisations”.

The award followed controversy over the academy’s supposed bias against American writers, including Philip Roth, who has long been on the media shortlist for a Nobel.

What the critics said about Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

“His fiction is characterised by a preoccupation with outsiders — adventurers on a quest, misfits, the deracinated and the dispossessed of the Third World . . .

“While Le Clézio’s output is undoubtedly uneven in quality, it is hard to deny the seriousness of his engagement with the world . . . and particularly, as his career has developed, with the world beyond European shores.”

(Adrian Tahourdin, The Times Literary Supplement, 2006)

“Le Clézio’s writing is simultaneously clear and intensive, impressionistic and controlled, nostalgic and contemporary. In an interview Le Clézio once said that his favourite novelists are Stevenson and Joyce — both exiled writers. Often his protagonists are loners, who try to find ways to cope with the modern life and technology, or come into conflict with urban surroundings.”

(Books and Writers, 2005)

“The novel [The Interrogation] has little rational development, but reads like a very intelligent collection of random ideas and even styles. There are some fetching typographical innovations, including words crossed out and what purports to be a page of a newspaper bound into the text at one point. It is extremely ambitious and deliberately naive by turns.”

(John Sturrock, writing in the TLS on Le Clezio’s first novel, in 1964)

“Le Clézio is a bewitching storyteller with a penchant for tales of survival that are at once acutely realistic and mythically romantic . . . [He] writes with high compassion.”

(Donna Seaman, Booklist review 2004)

“Basically, Le Clézio’s books transmit humanist values which date from an earlier time and which underlie present preoccupations. They update the debate between nature and culture, and they achieve a spiritual dimension through a quest for original purity.”

(Sophie Jollin, World Literature Today 1997)

“For many critics, Le Clézio’s principal virtue as a writer is his ability to construct a novelistic landscape that is dramatically different from the real world.”

(Warren Motte, World Literature Today, 1997)

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