PROFILE: JMG Le Clezio: Wayfarer through Distant Worlds

Oct 9, 2008, 11:09 GMT

Paris - Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who on Thursday was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature, is considered by many of his compatriots the greatest living French writer.

He was born on April 13, 1940, in the southern French city of Nice, to a French woman and a British doctor.

During World War II, the family was separated because his father was serving as a surgeon in Nigeria for the British Army and was unable to join his wife and children in Nice.

In 1948, Le Clezio travelled to Africa to be reunited with his father, and the trip apparently inspired his life-long fascination with traveling and with primitive worlds.

The journey is described in his 1991 semi-autobiographical novel Onitscha and in the 2004 novel The African.

After graduating from Nice's College Litteraire Universitaire, he worked as a teacher in Britain and studied at Bristol University and at the University of London.

His first novel, Le Proces Verbale (The Interrogation), published when he was just 23, was short-listed for the Prix Goncourt and won the Prix Renaudot.

It also made him an instant star of the French literary scene, from which he kept his distance, saying in a 1965 interview, 'Not sure yet if writing is a good manner of expression.'

Le Proces Verbale already contained the subjects that have marked much of his brilliant and productive literary career - the marvels of voyaging, the beauty of the primitive regions and their destruction by modern civilization.

In nearly 40 books, including novels, collections of short stories and essays - many of them translated into English - Le Clezio has described his search for pristine, almost pre-Edenic places, and their vulnerability to the neurotic and predatory behaviour of intruders from the industrial world.

He has also travelled in Nigeria and Japan and published translations of Mayan sacred texts.

He has taught at a Buddhist University in Thailand, at the University of Mexico, at Boston University, the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Since 1973, Le Clezio has divided his life between France, the United States and Mauritius.

In the novella Pawana, published in 1992, he wrote what may be described as his literary - and no doubt personal - quest:

'It was in the beginning, at the very beginning, when there was nobody on the sea, nothing more than birds and sunlight. Since childhood I had dreamed of going there, to this place where all began and all ended.'