The Swedish Academy has announced that French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has won the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature. Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel committee for literature commenting on Le Clezio said that he is a great writer of variety, and has come to include other civilizations, other modes of thought, and other modes of living than the Western in his writing.

 

The award has been announced after the bitter controversy that originated from the statement of Engdahl. Horace Engdahl had said that American literature is too isolated, too insular. He had contended that American writers are too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. However, commenting on Le Clezio, Engdahl said that he is a cosmopolitan in approach.

 

Engdahl on Le Clezio remarked that he is a global writer who lives in parts of the year in New Mexico as well as in France and on the island of Mauritius, where he has family roots. He recommended Le Clezio's autobiographical novel 'Revolutions' to readers. Factually, the Nobel award, which comes with a check for $1.4 million, will be presented to Le Clezio in Stockholm on Dec. 10.