J. M. G. Le Clézio

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was born in Nice during the Second World War, while his father, a British subject from a Breton family long settled in Mauritius, was serving with the British Army in Nigeria. He spent his early years in a village in the hills behind Nice, and in 1948 sailed with his mother and brother to join his father in Nigeria, a journey and a childhood he later drew on in Onitsha and the memoir The African. He studied at the University of Bristol and in Nice, and wrote a master’s thesis on Henri Michaux.

At twenty-three he won the Prix Renaudot with his first novel, The Interrogation (1963), whose alienated hero drifts through a seaside town; his early work was formally experimental and close to the concerns of the nouveau roman. A period in Mexico during his national service, and years spent with the Emberá people of Panama in the early 1970s, changed his direction. His later fiction is quieter and more lyrical, centred on children, wanderers and indigenous cultures, on the desert, the sea and the island of Mauritius. Desert (1980) sets the story of a young Moroccan woman against the Saharan resistance to French colonial rule, and The Prospector returns to his family’s Mauritian past.

Le Clézio holds French and Mauritian nationality and has lived in Nice, Albuquerque and Mauritius, teaching at universities around the world, including in South Korea and China. He has written more than forty books, including essays on Mexican history and translations of Native American texts.