J. M. G. Le Clézio Clézio used his Nobel prize acceptance lecture to attack the subject of information poverty. The title of his lecture was "Dans la forêt des paradoxes" ("In the forest of paradoxes"), a title he attributed to Stig Dagerman. Gao Xingjian, a Chinese émigré, was the previous French citizen to receive the prize (for 2000); Le Clézio was the first French-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature since Claude Simon for 1985, and the fourteenth since Sully Prudhomme, laureate of the first prize of 1901. He is a staunch defender of Mama Rosa, director of a Mexican shelter raided by
Paul Prudhomme a summer residence in New York in 1985, Prudhomme's pop-up restaurant was reported to the Board of Health, which visited the restaurant and closed it before it opened, reporting 29 violations of the city's health code. Prudhomme ignored the order and opened the restaurant anyway, resulting in the Board of Health threatening Prudhomme with time in jail if he continued to operate the restaurant. The city's mayor Ed Koch appeared with Prudhomme at the restaurant to declare an end to what the media reported as the "Gumbo war". The restaurant was quite successful during the five weeks it was open,