Nobel Prize for Literature for 2014 goes to French writer Patrick Modiano

Agencies

London, Oct 10, 2014: Paris’ literary doyen Patrick Modiano has won literature’s most coveted price for his unparalleled mastery in portraying loss and legacy. 

 

The Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to the French author "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-years-old Modiano, legendary for shunning the limelight is the 11th literature laureate born in France and is known to be a modern master in depicting brooding themes surrounding "memory, identity and guilt". 

 

He is known to be an authority on Paris with most of his epic works set in the city. 

 

Modiano’s struggle with his Jewish heritage is well known. He was born outside Paris to a Sephardic Jewish family with roots dating back to eminent rabbis in Greece. 

 

It haunted him for most part of his life having spent the early phase of his writing career bluffing away about his year of birth. 

 

He claimed he was born in 1947 in order to distance himself from the shame of the World War II.