FRENCH WRITER WINS NOBEL; CURATORS FOR TATE’S FRIEZE ART FAIR FUND
The Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a French novelist, children’s author, and essayist regarded by some French readers as one of the country’s greatest living writers, reports Alan Cowell in the New York Times. In its citation, the prize committee called Le Clézio an “author of new departures, poetic adventure, and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” The prize, won last year by the British author Doris Lessing, was worth $1.43 million. Le Clézio, sixty-eight, published his first novel, The Interrogation, in 1963 and was regarded in the early years of his career as a writer who sought new narrative methods, influenced by travels across the globe, including to Panama, where he lived with an Indian tribe. The announcement followed days of literary argument over remarks by the secretive Nobel Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, suggesting that American writers were too much under the sway of American popular culture to qualify for the prize. Le Clézio has written more than forty books, twelve of which have been translated into English. His breakthrough novel establishing him as among France’s leading modern writers is generally held to be Désert in 1980, which won a prize from the French Academy. The Nobel committee said on Thursday that “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.”
In other news, Tate Collection’s Outset/Frieze Art Fair Fund, in its sixth year, will have a total of $260,000 to enable the acquisition of major works from the Frieze Art Fair by emerging and leading international artists. The selected works will be announced by Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, at Tate Modern next Thursday. This year, the two international curators chosen for the fund are Thelma Golden, director and chief curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Sabine Breitwieser, independent curator and general secretary of CIMAM. Golden and Breitwieser will select the works with Tate curators Ann Gallagher, Jessica Morgan, and Frances Morris.
