French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio:
“author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”
I confess I haven’t heard of him before, but what a handsome devil he was in 1963.
He joins the illustrious companionship of Nobel prize winners, and the Prize for Literature has gone to the biggest of names: last year it went to Doris Lessing (who made quite a grump about it). Other notable previous winners – Harold Pinter. J.M. Coetzee. Gunter Grass. Toni Morrison. Steinbeck. Sartre. Galsworthy. George Bernard Shaw. Poets of the calibre of W B Yeats and T S Eliot. I’m particularly fond of the 1969-1971 triple whammy of Pablo Neruda, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Samuel Beckett. That’s some big guns.
12 October 2008 at 3:18 pm
The fact that a French-man won the Nobel Prize for Literature will certainly annoy the anglophiles. After all, everyone now accepts that English is the international language.
I apologise for the satire, but speak as a native English speaker. Then, if English is unacceptable, on grounds of linguistic imperialism, what about Esperanto?
Yes Esperanto was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature, in the name of Icelandic poet Baldur Ragnarrson.
This is true. Esperanto does have its own original literature. Please check http://www.esperanto.net to confirm.
13 October 2008 at 9:16 am
Why is the Nobel Prize always ( well, often) awarded to someone no one has heard of? He’s not even good-looking either – I think he looks like a clone or Max Headroom (remember him?).