Nobel goes to Yankee (not)
This year’s Nobel Prize for literature was just awarded to French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio.
The Academy, which decides the winner of the prestigious 10 million Swedish crown ($1.4 million) prize, praised the 68-year-old for his adventurous novels, essays and children’s literature.
“His works have a cosmopolitan character. Frenchman, yes, but more so a traveller, a citizen of the world, a nomad,” Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told a news conference to announce the laureate.
Quillblog will cop to ignorance of Le Clezio’s oeuvre without too much shame: a quick Amazon search turns up only one volume in English, Prospector. (It’s listed as a 1994 Putnam title that’s not in stock.) But then, here in Canada we’re probably a little too close to that “insular and ignorant” American literary culture.
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Strangely enough, Mr. Clezio chooses to live most of the year in the US. Perhaps he finds the atmosphere less stifling than that of perennially defensive and entrenched Europe.
It’s nice to see that the actual creatives are not as biased as those who choose to judge.
[…] literary world was all a-titter over the dismissal of American literature as insular (and worse), by the Nobel Prize […]
[…] this month, Quillblog copped ignorance to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio’s work, since there was only one English title available on […]