The novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was yesterday awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He is the first French writer to win the title since Claude Simon in 1985.

JMG Le Clézio, as he is more commonly known, was born in Nice in 1940, and hails from a Breton family which emigrated to Mauritius in the 18th century. A peripatetic childhood took him from Nice to Nigeria and back again to his birthplace, where he finished his studies having begun an English literature degree at Bristol university in the late 1950s.