STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — France’s Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for works characterized 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 honored in 2000.

The decision was in line with the Swedish Academy’s recent picks of European authors. Last year’s prize went to Doris Lessing of Britain.

The academy called Le Clezio an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

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 civilization imposed by colonial France at the beginning of the 20th century.

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.”’

Le Clezio told Swedish Radio he was busy reading when a member of the academy phoned him on his wife’s telephone to announce the news.

“I am very touched and very emotional, it is a great honor for me,” he said.

Le Clezio described himself as “born of a mix, like many people currently in Europe.” He said while he was born in France, his father was British.

He was already planning to travel to Sweden later this month to receive another award — the Stig Dagerman prize, which honors efforts to promote the freedom of expression.

Since Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe won the award in 1994, the selections have had a distinctly European flavor. Since then 12 Europeans, including Le Clezio, have won the prize. The last U.S. writer to win the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993.

Last week, Academy Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl told The Associated Press that the United States is too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world. The comments were met with fierce reactions from across the Atlantic, where the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation offered to send Engdahl a reading list.

“I was very surprised that the reaction was so violent. I don’t think that what I said was that derogatory or sensational,” Engdahl told AP after Thursday’s prize announcement.

He added that his comments had been “perhaps a bit too generalizing.”