Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave

French author, born and raised in Nice. His parents were British citizens with roots in Bretagne and in Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Since 1978, the author is a French-Mauritian citizen. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the father was working as a British army surgeon in Nigeria and found himself all of a sudden completely cut off from his family, which had taken up residence in Nice. He was not reunited with his family until 1948 when his wife took their two sons, the author and his brother, on a boat trip which, after several months, brought them to the coast of Nigeria. From there they continued to the city of Ogoja, which is situated in the middle of the territory which for a certain time was referred to by the name of Biafra. The author was at that time eight years old, and this meeting with two foreign and mind-shaking worlds, his father and Africa, would lie at the basis of three fundamental themes in his authorship: alienation, rootlessness, and respect for the different. Constantly on the move, more nomad than a traveler, the adult world traveler Le Clézio would later say about his childhood journey: "I have a feeling that I will never have made more than one single journey in my life: that one." In 1950, the whole family returned to Nice, which has been the author’s base ever since.