Patrick Modiano has been named the 107th winner of the Nobel prize for literature, reports The Guardian.
The 69-year-old is the 11th French writer to win the prestigious prize, worth 8m kronor ($1.1m or £700,000).
His name was announced at a short ceremony in Stockholm with Peter Englund, the Nobel Academy’s permanent secretary, reading a citation which said Modiano won “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 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.
The writer was born in a west Paris suburb two months after the second world war ended in Europe in July 1945.
His father was of Jewish Italian origins and met his Belgian actor mother during the occupation of Paris, and Modiano’s beginnings have strongly influenced his writing.
Jewishness, the Nazi occupation and loss of identity are recurrent themes in his novels, which include 1968’s 'La Place de l’Etoile' – later hailed in Germany as a key post-Holocaust work.
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 20s.
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.
Read more of this report from The Guardian.