The French novelist J. M. G. (Jean-Marie Gustave) Le Clézio has won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Le Clézio, who was born in 1940, is the author of over thirty books – mainly novels, but also philosophical essays and travelogues, as well as several translations and books for children. From stylistically bold and experimental beginnings – notably Le Proces-verbal (The Deposition, 1963) – he moved into a more lyrical and expansive mode, in novels that explored the West's engagement with other cultures. He has also drawn on his childhood and adolescence in the Mediterranean city of Nice for his long and as yet untranslated autobiogaphical novel Révolutions (2003).

Le Clézio, who lived in Mexico for extended periods, has written several works on pre-Columbian civilizations, including The Mexican Dream (1988) and a book on Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (1993). In 2007 he published a book about his passion for the cinema, Ballaciner. His most recent novel, Ritournelle de la faim, was published last week. The Nobel Academy called him an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization".

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