French Writer Wins Nobel Prize - Download Free Phim, Nhac, Phan Mem, Karaoke

conmeo · #1 (**permalink**) 10-09-2008, 07:40 AM

PARIS — Amid debate over purported bias against American writers, the Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature to Jean-Marie Gustave L Clézio, a French novelist, children’s author and essayist regarded by some French readers as one of the country’s greatest living writers. An academy official called him a “citizen of the world.”

In its citation, the prize committee in Stockholm called him an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” The prize, won last year by the British author Doris Lessing, was worth $1.43 million.

“I am very moved, very touched. It’s a great honor for me,” Mr. Le Clézio told Swedish public radio.

He was the 14th French writer to win the prize since it was created in 1901. Previous French winners include Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and André Gide. According to the Nobel Prize Web site, the first literature prize was awarded to a French writer, Sully Prudhomme.

Mr. Le Clézio , 68, published his first novel — “Le procès-verbal” (“The Interrogation”) in 1963. It was published in English a year later.

In the early years of his career, he was regarded as a writer who sought new narrative methods, influenced by travels across the globe, including to Panama, where he lived with an Indian tribe.

The announcement followed days of literary argument over remarks by the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, suggesting that American writers were too much under the sway of American popular culture to qualify for the prize.

The last American writer to win the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993. After a series of sharp comments by American critics, Mr. Engdahl toned down his remarks about American authors, saying the prize “is not a contest between nations but an award to individual authors.”

At a news conference in Stockholm on Thursday, Mr. Engdahl said Mr. Le Clézio’s “works have a cosmopolitan character. Frenchman, yes, but more so a traveler, a citizen of the world, a nomad.” According to the academy, he studied in Britain and France and has taught at universities in the United States, Thailand and Mexico.

Mr. Le Clézio has written more than 40 books, 12 of which have been translated into English. He was born on April 13, 1940, in Nice. Both parents had strong family connections with the former French and subsequently British colony of Mauritius, the Swedish Academy said.

When he was 8, Mr. Le Clézio and his family moved to Nigeria, where his father had been stationed as a doctor during World War II. “During the month-long voyage to Nigeria,” the academy said, “he began his literary career with two books” which “even contained a list of “forthcoming books.” His first novel in 1963 drew much critical attention. As the Swedish Academy put it on Thursday, “As a young writer in the aftermath of existentialism and the nouveau roman, he was a conjurer who tried to lift words above the degenerate state of everyday speech and to restore to them the power to invoke an essential reality.”

Early in his career, “Le Clézio stood out as an ecologically engaged author,” the academy said, with a series of books published in the 1960s and early 1970s, several of which — including Fever (1966), The Flood (1967) and Terra Amata (1969) — were published in English.

The breakthrough novel establishing him as among France’s leading modern writers is generally held to be “Désert” in 1980, which won a prize from the French Academy.

“This 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,” the academy said. “The main character, the Algerian guest worker Lalla, is a utopian antithesis to the ugliness and brutality of European society.”

Mr. Le Clézio also published collections of essays influenced by long stays in Mexico and Central America, the Swedish Academy said. His books for children and youth include Lullaby, published in French in 1980, and Balaabilou, published in French in 1985.

In 1975 he married his wife, Jemia, a Moroccan, and since the 1990s the two have divided their time between Albuquerque, N.M., Mauritius and Nice, the academy said.

“The emphasis of Le Clézio’s work has increasingly moved in the direction of an exploration of the world of childhood and of his own family history,” the academy said, listing the most important themes of his work as “memory, exile, the reorientations of youth, cultural conflict.”

Among Mr. Le Clézio’s most recent works are “Ballaciner,” published in 2007 and described by the prize committee as “a deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film and the importance of film in the author’s life, from the hand-turned projectors of his childhood, the cult of cinéaste trends in his teens, to his adult forays into the art of film as developed in unfamiliar parts of the world.”

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)