French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Swedish Academy named Le Clezio, 68, as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, an explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
Le Clezio garnered acclaim as a novelist with Desert, in 1980, a work the academy says "contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants."
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Le Clezio was born in Nice in 1940 and his family later moved to Nigeria, where his father had served as a doctor during World War II.