Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, (born April 13, 1940, Nice, France), French author known for his intricate, seductive fiction and distinctive works of nonfiction that mediated between the past and the present, juxtaposing the modern world with a primordial landscape of ambiguity and mystery. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008.
Le Clézio was descended from a Breton family that had immigrated to the formerly French and subsequently British colony of Mauritius. Bilingual in French and English, he spent part of his childhood in Nigeria before completing his secondary education in France. After studying for a time in England, he returned to France, where he earned an undergraduate degree (1963) from the Institut d’Études Littéraires (now the University of Nice) and a master’s degree (1964) from the University of Aix-en-Provence. In 1983 he completed a doctorate of letters at the University of Perpignan, France. Le Clézio traveled extensively and immersed himself in the study of other cultures, particularly those of the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America, which he wrote about in Trois Villes saintes (1980; “Three Holy Cities”), Le Rêve mexicain; ou, la pensée interrompue (1988; The Mexican Dream; or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations), and La Fête chantée (1997; “The Sung Feast”).
Although he emerged within the French literary milieu dominated by writers of the nouveau roman (New Novel) such as Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras, Le Clézio developed independently from his contemporaries and established himself early in his career as an author of singular achievement and temperament. He made his debut as a novelist with the publication in 1963 of Le Procès-verbal (The Interrogation) and gained widespread acclaim as a young author when the book—which had been sent as an unsolicited manuscript to the prestigious Gallimard publishing house—was awarded the Prix Renaudot. Other publications that further enhanced Le Clézio’s reputation in France and abroad included the short-story collection La Fièvre (1965; Fever) and the novels Le Déluge (1966; The Flood), Terra amata (1967; Eng. trans. Terra Amata), La Guerre (1970; War), and Les Géants (1973; The Giants). Le Clézio was drawn to the marginalized of society and offered a compassionate and evocative portrayal of the disenfranchised and displaced in search of meaning, identity, and reintegration. For example, Lalla, the protagonist of his acclaimed novel Désert (1980; Desert), is a North African Berber separated from her past and her cultural inheritance when she was forced to flee her desert homeland; she returns pregnant and resolved both to perpetuate her tribal inheritance and to embrace her legacy of memory and transcendence. Désert was awarded the Grand Prix Paul Morand by the French Academy.
Le Clézio’s works also include essays, criticism, children’s literature, and memoirs. Beginning with the publication in 1991 of Onitsha (Eng. trans. Onitsha), a semiautobiographical tale influenced by his childhood year in Nigeria, Le Clézio turned increasingly to semiautobiographical works such as the novels La Quarantaine (1995) and Révolutions (2003). In L’Africain (2004) Le Clézio recounted the childhood experience of being reunited with his father in the aftermath of World War II. Later works include Ballaciner (2007), a personal tribute to the art of filmmaking and its relationship to literature, and the novel Ritournelle de la faim (2008 “Ritornello of Hunger”).