A former University of Bristol student has been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.

French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio studied in Bristol from 1958-1959.

Le Clézio, 68, will receive the Nobel diploma, medal and $1.42 million (£815,000) at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.

The Swedish Academy, which chooses the winners, called Le Clézio an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation".

Le Clézio began writing as a child and has had more than 43 books published, among them Désert and, most recently, Ritournelle De La Faim (Same Old Story About Hunger), which explores French wartime guilt.

A poll by a French literary magazine in 1994 listed Le Clézio as the greatest French writer.

Le Clézio, born on April 13, 1940, in Nice, grew up speaking French and English. He completed his undergraduate degree, after leaving Bristol, in Nice (Institut d'Études Littéraires) in 1963, and took a master's degree at the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1964.

He taught at universities in Bangkok, Mexico City, Boston, Austin and Albuquerque.

Le Clézio received attention for his 1963 debut novel, Le procès-verbal (The Interrogation), but his breakthrough came in 1980 with Désert, for which he received a French Academy prize.

It describes images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of immigrants.