French Novelist Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
October 9, 2014
French novelist Patrick Modiano has been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature. He is the 11th French writer to receive the world’s highest prize for literature. Modiano’s fiction centers on the themes of memory, identity, and guilt. Many of his stories are set in Nazi occupied Paris during World War II (1939-1945). His novels frequent have a strong autobiographical element and are written in a documentary style. The author sometimes draws on interviews and newspaper articles in assembling his stories. Modiano frequently carries incidents and characters over from one book to another.
Modiano won the Prix Goncourt, France’s leading literary award, for his novel Missing Person (1978), a story about a detective who has lost his memory and whose final case is trying to discover who he really is. Dora Bruder (1997, translated as The Search Warrant, 2000) is based on the true story of a 15-year old Jewish girl in Paris who becomes a victim of the Holocaust.
Modiano was born on July 30, 1945, in Boulogne-Billancourt, a Paris suburb. His father was of Jewish-Italian background. One of Modiano’s high-school teachers was the popular French author Raymond Queneau, who played a major role in Modiano’s early writing career. Modiano gained attention with his first novel, The Place de l’Etoile (1968). The novel, set in Paris during the German occupation, is considered a major work of Holocaust literature.
Modiano’s other novels in English translation include Night Rounds (1969), Ring Roads (1974), A Trace of Malice (1988), Honeymoon (1990), and Out of the Dark (1998). In addition to his novels, Modiano has written children’s books and was the co-author of the screenplay for the French World War II motion picture Lacombe, Lucien (1973). Modiano also wrote a highly praised memoir, A Pedigree (2004).
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