French author Patrick Modiano wins 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2014 has been awarded to French author Patrick Modiano—the 15th French writer to win the prize.
The Swedish Academy awarded the 8m kronor (A$1.2m) prize to Modiano for ‘the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation’.
Modiano is well known in France as the author of over 20 novels and several screenplays, but is lesser known outside France. His best-known book is Missing Person (trans by Daniel Weissbort, David R Godine), set in 1965, about a detective who has lost his memory and in an effort to uncover his identity, discovers he was a Greek Jew who fled Paris during the Nazi occupation. Missing Person won the French literature prize Prix Goncourt in 1978.
Other novels feature themes around Nazi occupation and Jewish identity, beginning with his first novel in 1968, La Place de l’Étoile (Gallimard), about a Jewish collaborator during World War II. Modiano was born in Paris in July 1945—two months after World War II ended in Europe—to a Jewish-Italian father and Belgian mother, who met during the occupation of Paris.
Readings books division manager Martin Shaw told Books+Publishing that the bookstore has no Modiano titles stock, which may be typical of many Australian bookstores, especially since UK publishers last translated a Modiano book into English in 2000. ‘However, we’re confident that Penguin Random House and Hachette will quickly turnaround some new editions of the titles they published back in the 1970s and 80s,’ said Shaw, adding that the store will ‘also look at bringing in some US editions of various titles when they become available’.
‘There’s always a healthy demand for anything we can get our hands on, particularly if the authors are relatively unknown or overlooked—the bane of many a world author writing in a language other than English,’ said Shaw, citing recent Nobel winners Herta Mueller, Mo Yan and Jean-Marie Gustave de Clezio as examples.
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