This says more about the current state of public libraries and publishing than a hundred DCMS reviews. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the Nobel prize for literature this week. He has written at least a book a year since 1964. How many of the public libraries I use stock his works, either in French or in translation?
Brighton & Hove: 0 titles
East Sussex: 2 books, L'Africain and Revolutions, both in French and La ronde et autres faits divers on cassette, read in French by Bernard Giraudeau. Two out of three of these are kept locked away in a store, so have to be ordered.
Wandsworth: Coeur brûlé et autres romances, Le chercheur d'or and La Quarantaine, all in French. Wandsworth share a catalogue with a number of other London authorities, from which I could see that some public libraries have bought works by Le Clézio translated into Albanian and Turkish, but very few have bothered to buy translations into English.
