Jean-Marie Le Clezio - Nobel Literature 2008

Greetings,

Jean-Marie Le Clezio from France has won the 2008 Nobel prize for Literature. 

An excerpt from an interview on a French diplomatic site is linked below.

It is said that you are a potential Nobel prizewinner. Let’s imagine that you are awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature tomorrow. What would you like to say at the award ceremony? 

That’s a very hypothetical question! I don’t know for the Nobel prize but I know what I would like to talk about publicly. I would like to talk about the war that kills children. This, for me, is the most terrible thing of our age. Literature is also a means of reminding people of this tragedy and bringing it back to centre stage. 

In Paris recently, statues of women were veiled in order to condemn the fact that women in Afghanistan are denied freedom. That’s very good. In the same way, we should mark all the statues of children with a big red spot over the heart as a reminder that at every moment, somewhere in Palestine, South America or Africa, a child is killed by bullets. People never talk about that!

Metta.