STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP):

France's Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for works characterised by "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" and focused on the environment, especially the desert.

Le Clezio, 68, is the first French writer to win the prestigious award since Chinese-born Frenchman Gao Xingjian was honoured in 2000 and the 14th since the Nobel Prizes began in 1901.

The decision was in line with the Swedish Academy's recent picks of European authors, and followed days of vitriolic debate about whether the jury was anti-American.

Cultural influence

French President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed Le Clezio's win as a sign of France's worldwide cultural influence.

"A child of Mauritius and Nigeria, a teenager in Nice, a nomad of the American and African deserts, Jean-Marie Le Clezio is a citizen of the world, the son of all continents and cultures," Sarkozy said. "A great traveller, he embodies the influence of France, its culture and its values in a globalised world."

The academy called Le Clezio, who also holds Mauritian citizenship, an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation".

Le Clezio made his breakthrough as a novelist with Desert in 1980, a work the academy said "contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants".

That novel, which also won Le Clezio a prize from the French Academy, is considered a masterpiece. It describes the ordeal of Lalla, a woman from the Tuareg nomadic tribe of the Sahara Desert, as she adapts to civilisation imposed by colonial France.

The Swedish Academy said Le Clezio from early on "stood out as an ecologically engaged author, an orientation that is accentuated with the novels Terra Amata, The Book of Flights, War and The Giants".

Speaking to reporters in Paris, Le Clezio described feeling waves of emotion upon hearing the news.

"(I felt) some kind of incredulity, and then some kind of awe, and then some kind of joy and mirth," he said.

The newest Nobel laureate also insisted that French culture was not dead - as Time magazine had claimed in an article last year.

"I deny it," said the globe-trotting writer. "It's a very rich, very diversified culture. There's no risk of decline."

French culture

Le Clezio said one of the reasons French culture is so rich is because it has been influenced by French-speaking countries around the world.

He also singled out American writer Philip Roth as someone he felt should win a Nobel.

"Philip Roth is a very great writer, I think he will certainly have the prize," Le Clezio said. "But even if he doesn't get it, he's still a very great writer."

Le Clezio was already planning to travel to Sweden later this month to receive another award - the Stig Dagerman prize, which honours efforts to promote the freedom of expression.

Since Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe won the award in 1994, the selections have had a distinctly European flavour. Since then 12 Europeans, including Le Clezio and last year's winner Doris Lessing of Britain, have won the prize.

The last United States writer to win the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993.

Derek Walcott of St Lucia is the only English-speaking Caribbean writer to have won the award.