2014 Nobel Prize in Literature | |
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Patrick Modiano | |
Date |
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Location | Stockholm, Sweden |
Presented by | Swedish Academy |
First awarded | 1901 |
Website | Official website |
The 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French novelist Patrick Modiano (born 1945) "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation." [1] He became the 15th Frenchman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature after J. M. G. Le Clézio in 2008. [2]
Patrick Modiano's stories are often characterized by their exploration of universal but difficult questions, at the same time as they are grounded in everyday settings and historical events like in La Place de l'Étoile ("The Place of the Star", 1968). His works center around subjects like memory, oblivion, identity, and guilt as in Rue des Boutiques Obscures ("Missing Person", 1978) and Dora Bruder (1997). The city of Paris plays a central role in his writing – Accident nocturne ("Paris Nocturne", 2003), and his stories are often based on events that occurred during the German occupation of France during World War II. At times, Modiano's stories are based on his own experience or on interviews, newspaper articles, or his own notes. Among his other famous literary works include Un cirque passe ("After the Circus", 1992), Quartier Perdu ("A Trace of Malice", 1984), and L'Herbe des nuits ("The Black Notebook", 2012). [3] [2]
Called "a Marcel Proust of our time", [4] Modiano heard the news via a mobile phone call from his daughter while walking through Paris, "just next to the Jardin du Luxembourg" where he lives. [5] The win was unexpected, even to those in the Anglo-American world most familiar with his work. [6] [7] The puzzlement was likely related to limited knowledge of Modiano in the English-speaking world; despite his prolific output, fewer than a dozen of his works had been translated into English, and several of those were out of print before the academy's announcement. The award-winning Missing Person had sold just 2,425 copies in the US prior to the Nobel. [4] Even Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, noted that many people outside France would likely be unfamiliar with Modiano and his work. "He is well-known in France, but not anywhere else," he said in a post-announcement interview. [8] Yale University Press quickly published three of his novels in English.
Jean Patrick Modiano, generally known as Patrick Modiano, is a French novelist and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is a noted writer of autofiction, the blend of autobiography and historical fiction.
Missing Person is the sixth novel by French writer Patrick Modiano, published on 5 September 1978. In the same year it was awarded the Prix Goncourt. The English translation by Daniel Weissbort was published in 1980. Rue des Boutiques Obscures is the name of a street in Rome where one of the characters lived, and where Modiano himself lived for some time.
Dora Bruder is a biography, an autobiography and a detective novel by French writer Patrick Modiano about a Jewish teenage girl who went missing during the German occupation of Paris. It was first published in French on 2 April 1997 and published in English in December 1999.
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