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
Sully Prudhomme (1874), permanently damaged his health. During his career, Prudhomme gradually shifted from the sentimental style of his first books towards a more personal style which unified the formality of the Parnassus school with his interest in philosophical and scientific subjects. The inspiration was clearly Lucretius's "De rerum natura", for the first book of which he made a verse translation. His philosophy was expressed in "La Justice" (1878) and "Le Bonheur" (1888). The extreme economy of means employed in these poems has, however, usually been judged as compromising their poetical quality without advancing their claims as works of philosophy. He was