French writer Patrick Modiano has won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature for works that made him “a Marcel Proust of our time,” the Swedish Academy said yesterday.
Relatively unknown outside of France, Modiano’s works have centred on memory, oblivion, identity and guilt that often take place during the German occupation of World War Two. He has written novels, children’s books and film scripts.
“You could say he’s a Marcel Proust of our time,” Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told reporters.
The academy said the award of 8 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million) was “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”.
Some of Modiano’s roughly 30 works include “A Trace of Malice” and “Honeymoon”. His latest work is the novel “Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier”.
Modiano was born in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt in July 1945, several months after the official end of Nazi occupation in late 1944. He became a household name in France during the late 1970s but never appeared comfortable before cameras and soon withdrew from the gaze of publicity.
He is also known for having co-written the script of Louis Malle’s controversial 1974 movie “Lacombe Lucien” about a teenager living under the Occupation who is rejected by the French resistance and falls in with pro-Nazi collaborators.
“After each novel, I have the impression that I have cleared it all away,” Modiano told France Today in a 2011 interview. “But I know I’ll come back over and over again to tiny details, little things that are part of what I am.”
“In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.”