French author Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature

French author Patrick Modiano on 9 October 2014 won the Nobel Prize for literature for the year 2014. The Nobel Prize for Literature is granted by the Swedish Academy.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 was awarded to Patrick Modiano for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.

The award presented to the writer is worth eight million kronor.

Patrick Modiano
•    Modiano was born in July 1945 in a Paris suburb during the immediate aftermath of World War II.
•    He studied at Lycee Henri-IV in Paris where his geometry teacher was Raymond Queneau, a writer.
•    Modiano has published some 30 books mainly novels and his storylines usually centre on young men cast adrift among high-living crooks in 1960s Paris.
•    Modiano's narrators try to make sense of half-remembered events from their youth, looking back through a glass darkly.
•    Much of the his work looked at the Vichy regime in occupied France during World War 2, particularly the part it played in the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.
•    Modiano's debut novel La Place de l'Etoile was published in 1968 but is yet to be translated into English.
•    Many of Modiano's other works have been translated into English including Les boulevards de ceinture (1972), Villa Triste (1975), Quartier perdu (1984) and Voyage de noces (1990).
•    His most recent novel is Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier (2014).
•    Modiano also worked with film director Louis Malle on the screenplay of Lacombe Lucien (1974), a feature film about a teenage boy during the German occupation of France.
•    His sixth novel, Missing Person (Rue des boutiques obscures) won the French literary award the Prix Goncourt in 1978.
•    In 2012, he won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.