Le Clezio wins Nobel prize for literature. Qui?

The Nobel prize for literature has been won by 68-year-old French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (pictured). Today’s announcement is likely to enrage the American literary establishment who are still smarting from remarks made last week by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the body that chooses the winner, about US writing being "insular" and "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture".

Presumably Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, who were both up for the Nobel, fell into this category (at least in Engdahl's opinion). The Swedish academy called Le Clezio an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization".

Besides picking up a 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) cheque, Le Clezio will receive a gold medal and be invited to give a lecture at the academy's headquarters in the Swedish capital's Old Town. Le Clezio may not yet have a huge international reputation – to be frank, it was hard to find anyone in London today who had heard of him - but he is considered by some of his compatriots to be the greatest living French writer.

He was born on April 13, 1940, and 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 Verbal (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". In nearly 40 books, including novels, collections of short stories and essays, 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.

All this appears to back up what Engdahl said about why US writers were not good enough to win the award. "They don't translate [foreign books] enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," he said. "That ignorance is restraining. Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world."