{"id":34022,"date":"2014-10-11T14:53:37","date_gmt":"2014-10-11T18:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=34022"},"modified":"2014-10-11T14:53:37","modified_gmt":"2014-10-11T18:53:37","slug":"french-writer-patrick-modiano-wins-the-2014-nobel-prize-in-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=34022","title":{"rendered":"French writer Patrick Modiano wins the 2014 Nobel prize in literature"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nBy
\nPaul Owen,Mark Brown&Alison Flood<\/strong><\/p>\n

Patrick Modiano has been named the 111th winner of the Nobel prize for literature.
\nThe 69-year-old is the 15th French writer to win the prestigious prize, worth 8m kronor ($1.1m or \u00a3700,000).<\/p>\n

His name was announced at a short ceremony in Stockholm with Peter Englund, the Nobel Academy\u2019s permanent secretary, reading a citation which said Modiano won \u201cfor the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation\u201d.<\/p>\n

Modiano is well known in France but something of an unknown quantity for even widely read people in other countries. His best known novel is probably Missing Person, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978 and is about a detective who loses his memory and endeavours to find it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The writer was born in a west Paris suburb two months after the second world war ended in Europe in July 1945.<\/p>\n

His father was of Jewish Italian origins and met his Belgian actor mother during the occupation of Paris, and Modiano\u2019s beginnings have strongly influenced his writing.<\/p>\n

Jewishness, the Nazi occupation and loss of identity are recurrent themes in his novels, which include 1968\u2019s La Place de l\u2019Etoile \u2013 later hailed in Germany as a key post-Holocaust work.<\/p>\n

He owes his big break to a friendship with a friend of his mother, the French writer Raymond Queneau, who was first introduced him to the Gallimard publishing house when he was in his early 20.<\/p>\n

Modiano, who lives in Paris, is known to shun media, and rarely accords interviews. In 2012, he won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.<\/p>\n

Englund said: \u201cPatrick Modiano is a well-known name in France but not anywhere else. He writes children\u2019s books, movie scripts but mainly novels. His themes are memory, identity and time.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis best known work is called Missing Person. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Modiano\u2019s win was not a total surprise, with Ladbrokes quoting odds of 10\/1 for him earlier this week, fourth favourite behind the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong\u2019o (7\/2), the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (4\/1) and the Belarussian journalist Svetlana Aleksijevitj.<\/p>\n

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 became a 20-name longlist and then a five-name shortlist.<\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s award went to the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro.<\/p>\n

Worth 8m kronor each, the Nobel prizes are always handed out on 10 December, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel\u2019s death in 1896. Besides the prize money, each laureate receives a diploma and a gold medal.<\/p>\n

Nobel, a wealthy Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, provided few directions for how to select winners, except that the prize committees should reward those who \u201chave conferred the greatest benefit to mankind\u201d.<\/p>\n

Courtesy:The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Paul Owen,Mark Brown&Alison Flood Patrick Modiano has been named the 111th winner of the Nobel prize for literature. The 69-year-old is the 15th French writer to win the prestigious prize, worth 8m kronor ($1.1m or \u00a3700,000). His name was announced at a short ceremony in Stockholm with Peter Englund, the Nobel Academy\u2019s permanent secretary, …<\/p>\n

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