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 Le Clézio, a cosmopolitan 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", reflecting a canon of work depicted by the academy as distilled from experience in Mexico, Central America and North Africa and suffused with a quest for lost culture and new spiritual realities. 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," Le Clézio told Swedish public radio.
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 Le Clézio, a cosmopolitan 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", reflecting a canon of work depicted by the academy as distilled from experience in Mexico, Central America and North Africa and suffused with a quest for lost culture and new spiritual realities.
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," Le Clézio told Swedish public radio.
The first paragraph of the New York Times, when they brought the good news from Stockholm to the Big Apple, said it all: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 Le Clézio, a French novelist, children's author and essayist regarded by some French readers as one of the country's 20 greatest living writers.Note the location in the first word - not the Swedish but the French capital. And that poisonously barbed qualification, "some French readers". The subtext: "we wuz robbed!"
The first paragraph of the New York Times, when they brought the good news from Stockholm to the Big Apple, said it all:
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 Le Clézio, a French novelist, children's author and essayist regarded by some French readers as one of the country's 20 greatest living writers.
Note the location in the first word - not the Swedish but the French capital. And that poisonously barbed qualification, "some French readers". The subtext: "we wuz robbed!"
