French novelist Le Clézio wins Nobel literature prize

French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, a globetrotting novelist hailed as a child of all continents, has won the Nobel prize for literature.
"His works have a cosmopolitan character. Frenchman, yes, but more so a traveler, a citizen of the world, a nomad," Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Academy, told a news conference to announce the laureate.

There are few modern writers more cosmopolitan than Le Clézio. He was born in France. His father was a Mauritian-born British doctor. He spent part of his childhood with his father in Africa and several years in the 1970s living with an Indian tribe in Panama. He now lives and teaches for most of the year in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He once said: "The French language is my only country, the only place that I call home."
His best-known book, written in 1980, is Desert, which contrasts the ugliness and ignorance of Europe, as experienced by immigrants, with the simple nobility of a lost Tuareg civilisation in the Sahara, destroyed by French colonialism.
The Swedish Academy said it had awarded Le Clézio the prize of 10 million Swedish kroner (£790,000) because he was an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, an explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation".