The African
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE 2008 'From that moment on, there was to be a before and an after Africa for me.' In 1948, a young J. M. G. Le Clezio left behind a still-devastated Europe with his mother and brother to join his father, a military doctor in Nigeria, from whom he had been separated by the war. In his characteristically intimate, poetic voice, the Nobel Prize-winning author relates both the child's dazzled discovery of freedom in the African savannah and the torment of recalling his fractured relationship with a rigid, authoritarian father. The African is a memoir of a lost childhood and a tribute to a father whom Le Clezio never really knew. His legacy is the passionate anti-colonialism that the author has carried through his life. "Haunting' - The Guardian 'Le Clezio is ever the master at rendering existence at the level of sensation with a daring and admirable freshness of language' - New York Times 'A vivid depiction of a splintered childhood and the lovely wholeness procured from it' - Kirkus Reviews AUTHOR: J.M.G. Le Clezio (b.1940) is the author of more than forty works of fiction and non-fiction. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature as an author of new departures, poetic adventures and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation.
J.M.G. Le Clézio (b.1940) is the author of more than forty works of fiction and non-fiction. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature as an author of new departures, poetic adventures and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation.
C. Dickson lived in West Africa for five years and now lives in France. Among her numerous translations are two other novels by Le Clézio, Desert and The Prospector.
