Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, novelist, children’s author, and essayist, has received the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature. The Swedish Academy announced their decision October 9, calling him a “cross-cultural citizen” and an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” According to the Nobel Prize website, Le Clézio joins the list of thirteen other French writers, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Andre Gide, and Sully Prudhomme, the first literature recipient in the prize’s history. Le Clézio is the author of more than forty books, twelve of which have been published in English. He was born in Nice in 1940. At the age of eight he moved with his family to Nigeria, where his father had been a doctor during World War II. His first novel, Le procès-verbal (The Interrogation), was released in 1963. Other early publications, according to the Academy, including Fever (1966), The Flood (1967), and Terra Amata (1969), marked him as an “ecologically engaged author.” 1980’s Désert, winner of a prize from the French Academy, secured his reputation as a contemporary writer of merit in France. “This work 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,” the academy said about the novel. “The main character, the Algerian guest worker Lalla, is a utopian antithesis to the ugliness and brutality of European society.” In 2007, Le Clézio published “Ballaciner,” described by the academy as “a deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film and the importance of film in the author’s life, from the hand-turned projectors of his childhood, the cult of cinéaste trends in his teens, to his adult forays into the art of film as developed in unfamiliar parts of the world.” Lullaby and Balaabilou are two of his works written for children. The prize is worth $1.43 million.