French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization," the Nobel committee said in its 2008 award statement.
Mr. Le Clézio was relatively unknown at the time in the United States, where few of his works were available in translation. That led to criticism that the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize each year, was veering Eurocentric. Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Academy, did not help this view when he criticized American writers as “too isolated, too insular,” and declared Europe was “the center of the literary world," The New York Times then reported.
