French author Modiano wins Nobel Literature prize
NEWS CENTER (DİHA) - The Nobel Academy described the novelist, whose work has often focused on the Nazi occupation of France, as "a Marcel Proust of our time".
The award - presented to a living writer - is worth eight million kronor (£691,000). Previous winners include literary giants such as Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway. Modiano beat bookies' favourites Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The last French writer to win the prize was Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio in 2008. The academy said the award was "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation". "This is someone who has written many books that echo off each other... that are about memory, identity and aspiration," Peter Englund, the academy's permanent secretary said.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, quoted by Reuters news agency, said Modiano was "undoubtedly one of the greatest writers" of recent years. "This is well-deserved for a writer who is moreover discreet, as is much of his excellent work." Modiano, 69, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, a suburb of Paris, to a businessman father and an actress mother. He studied at Lycee Henri-IV in Paris, where his geometry teacher was Raymond Queneau, a writer who was to prove a major influence.
Professor Sean Hand, the head of the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick said readers of Modiano "see his work as being concerned with a number of basic themes about memory, loss, identity and real ambiguities that are inherent in all of these". Much of the author's work, he said, looked at the Vichy regime in occupied France during World War 2, particularly the part it played in the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. Modiano's debut novel, La Place de l'Etoile, was published in 1968 but, more than 40 years later, has yet to be translated into English.
(nt)
