J. M. G. Le Clézio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Nice in 1940. In 1963 he received the Renaudot Prize for his first novel, Le proces-verbal. He has studied the Indian civilizations of pre-Columbian Mexico since 1971 and has published translations of Mayan sacred texts and an evocation of three sacred villages in the land of the Maya, Trois villes saintes (1980).