Le Clezio on Literacy

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio's Nobel address is now available on the Nobel Prize website. It is a stirring tribute to writing and bearing witness, and ends with a plea for making stories available to all as a human right.

Literacy and the struggle against hunger are connected, closely interdependent. One cannot succeed without the other. Both of them require, indeed urge, us to act. So that in this third millennium, which has only just begun, no child on our shared planet, regardless of gender or language or religion, shall be abandoned to hunger or ignorance, or turned away from the feast. This child carries within him the future of our human race. In the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, a very long time ago, the kingdom belongs to a child.