One of the most translated modern French authors, whose first novel appeared when he was only 23 years old. Due to his early experimentalist approach to novel, Le Clézio has been counted among the avant-garde writers, but actually his work is difficult to pin down. Le Clézio's themes are cross-cultural. He moves freely, without restriction, from one continent to another, fusing ideas and images from different kinds of literature and culture. Le Clézio was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008.
Le Clézio's writing is simultaneously clear and intensive, impressionistic and controlled, nostalgic and contemporary. In an interview Le Clézio once said, that his favorite novelist are Stevenson and Joyce - noteworthy both exiled writers. Often his protagonists are loners, who try to find ways to cope with the modern life and technology, or come into conflict with urban surroundings.
Le procès-verbal was soon translated into several languages, among others into Finnish. In spite of his international fame, Le Clézio chose to stay away from fashionable literary circles, saying in an article in 1965: "Not yet sure if writing is a good way of expression." He taught at a Buddhist University in Thailand in 1966-67, at the University of Mexico, and at the Boston University, University of Texas, Austin, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Since 1973 Le Clézio has divided his life between France, the U.S. and Mauritius. He has also traveled in Nigeria and Japan and published translations of Mayan sacred texts.
Through Le Clézio's novels the sun and the sea, light and water, are recurrent images. From 1969 to 1973 Le Clézio lived among the Embera Indians in Panama. Haï (1971), written during this period, is a lyrical account of the author's experience which, as he has confessed, changed his whole life. On the whole, the natural environment, animate and inanimate, forms a kind of philosophical, unifying ground for Le Clézio's themes.
Le Clézio's constant travels are reflected in the settings of his books. Through his own experience he has described the clash of cultures, and the unequal side of globalization, the domination of Western rationalism. In Désert (1980), which received prix Paul Morand, a young nomad woman, Lalla, from the Sahara becomes a famous photo model, but she returns to the desert to give birth to her child. A parallel story tells of the crushing of the Tuaregs in the beginning of the 20th century by the French colonizers.
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