French writer Patrick Modiano wins Nobel Prize for Literature

French writer Patrick Modiano, who has made a lifelong study of the Nazi occupation and its effects on his country, has won the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature. The Swedish Academy gave the $1.1 million prize to Modiano for evoking “the most ungraspable human destinies” and uncovering the world of life behind the Nazi occupation. Modiano, 69, whose novel “Missing Person” won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978, was born in a west Paris suburb in July 1945, two months after World War II ended in Europe.

Patrick Modiano is a well-known name in France but not anywhere else. He writes children’s books, movie scripts but mainly novels. His themes are memory, identity and time.

Peter Englund, secretary of the Nobel Academy

Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Academy said Modiano’s works often explore the themes of time, memory and identity. “He is returning to the same topics again and again simply because these topics, you can’t exhaust them.” The winner is chosen by an academy consisting of 18 prominent Swedish literary figures. This year 210 nominations were received 36 of which were first timers. That then became a 20-name longlist and then a five-name shortlist.

I’ve always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.

Modiano speaking in a rare interview last week in Telerama magazine.

Arts modiano