Patrick Modiano Wins 2014 Nobel Prize In Literature

Uncovering Life Worlds Through The Art Of Memory: Patrick Modiano Wins 2014 Nobel Prize In Literature

French author Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2014 for "the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation." The 69 year old author of more than two dozen books and many screenplays. Modiano was won in France. He is also the recipient of many other honours such as the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the Prix modial Cino Del Duca and the Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded by the members of the Royal Swedish Academy along with academics and thinkers appointed to lifetime memberships. The Academy elects the Nobel Committee for Literature from within its own members and this committee invites well known academy members, former laureates and qualified nominations from across the world for nominations for the prize. The committee then selects a list of candidates from this and the final decision regarding the prize is made by the complete 18 member Swedish Academy who review the life's work of the nominees before choosing the winner.

Modiano is the 111th winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and he is the 15th French writer to win this coveted prize. The Nobel Prize for literature involves a cash prize of 8m kroner or USD 1.1 million/£700,000. Modiano's name was announced at the short ceremony in Stockholm by Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Academy.

Modiano is well known in France for his outstanding works. One of his most popular novels is Missing Person which won the coveted Prix Goncourt in the year 1978 and is about an amnesiac detective who tries to find his memory. Born to a Jewish Italian father and a Belgian mother in a Paris suburb, Modiano's writings influence his heritage. His key post Holocaust work is La Place de L'Etoile and it speaks of the loss of identity faced by the Jewish community following the Nazi occupation.

Englund was quoted as saying “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.

“His best known work is called Missing Person. It’s the story about a detective who has lost his memory and his final case is finding out who he really is: he is tracing his own steps through history to find out who he is.”

He also said of the Nobel Laureate “They are small books, 130, 150 pages, which are always variations of the same theme - memory, loss, identity, seeking. Those are his important themes: memory, identity and time.”