Courtesy Wikipedia Horace Engdahl announces Le Clézio winning the Nobel Prize for Literature on 9 October 2008.

The Nobel Prize for Literature for 2008 has been announced. The winner is French novelist, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. The prize comes with a diploma, a gold medal, and approximately $1.3 million US dollars. Le Clezio is described as the Nobel Committee as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization." Le Clezio's novels include L'Africain and Ouranie. The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded by the Nobel Foundation since 1901. The first Nobel laureate in literature was Sully Prudhomme. Since then, authors such as Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats and Albert Camus have been awarded the prize. There was a slight uproar last month when one of the judges said that another American would never win the prize because, in his opinion, American literature cannot compete with European literature.