PARIS — Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, a globe-trotting French author of books exploring indigenous and nomadic cultures in Latin America, Africa and Asia, on Thursday won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Le Clezio, 68, has written about 50 books and has won critical acclaim and a devoted following in France. But his profile remains relatively low, and he is largely unknown in the United States.

In announcing the prize Thursday, the Nobel academy in Stockholm, Sweden, called Le Clezio an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner were among leaders celebrating the award. Kouchner, himself an inveterate traveler as a former head of Doctors Without Borders, praised Le Clezio's interests that include the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico and the deserts of Morocco.

"From Albuquerque to Seoul, from New York to Panama, from London to Lagos, Jean-Marie Le Clezio lives, travels, crosses and loves a great number of countries, of peoples, of civilizations, of cultures," Kouchner said.

Le Clezio discussed the honor in an improvised news conference in the offices of Gallimard, his publisher. Living up to the sobriquet of the "nomad writer," he had just returned from a trip to the Korean peninsula. He thanked the academy and said he wanted to send a public message: Keep reading

"It is a very good means for questioning the world today, without having answers that are too schematic," he said. "The novelist is not a philosopher, he is not a technician of the language; he is someone who writes, who asks himself questions. If there is a message to send, it is that we must ask ourselves questions."

The selection marked another year in which the academy declined to pick better-known writers who have yet to be honored, such as Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa and American author Philip Roth. The last U.S. author to win a Nobel was Toni Morrison in 1993.

Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation, said of Le Clezio, "I've never heard of him. Nobody I know has ever heard of him."

But Augenbraum cautions against making a snap judgment just because Le Clezio isn't better known.

"You can look at the award from two different points of view," he said. "One aspect is that it's good because it helps create a whole new readership. But it also continues the political nature of the award."

Le Clezio spends most of his time in Albuquerque, N.M., with his wife and two daughters but also maintains homes in France. He makes few public appearances, preferring to travel to remote places and pursue his fascination with the environment. Le Monde newspaper described him Thursday as a tall, blond man with the "photogenic allure of an elegant cowboy."

Le Clezio was born in Nice, France, on April 13, 1940, and spent part of his childhood in Africa. His father was British and his mother French. His literary influences include Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad and their themes of restless voyagers and solitary adventurers, according to Le Monde. He served in the French military in overseas posts in Thailand and Mexico.

During the early 1970s he traveled in Latin America, spending months with indigenous communities in Panama that had a profound effect on him.

"This experience changed all of my life, my ideas about the world of art, my way of being with others, of walking, of eating, of sleeping, of loving and even my dreams," he once said.

One his major works is "Desert," a 1980 novel about a Tuareg woman from the Sahara desert. In a different vein, he wrote "Diego and Frida," a biography of the politically committed Mexican artists and tormented lovers Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, published in 1993.

His most recent novel is "The Tune of Hunger," a portrait of a young Frenchwoman coming of age as World War II looms. A review in Le Monde this year described it as a moving, expertly drawn portrait.

Sicakyuz reported from Paris and Rotella from Madrid, Spain. Staff writer David L. Ulin in Los Angeles contributed to this report.