Patrick Modiano Wins 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature

69-year-old Patrick Modiano , a French author whose tales center on memory and guilt has won this year's Nobel Prize in literature, the Nobel committee in Sweden said Thursday. He is the 11th Nobel literature prize winner born in France.

 

He is being honored "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation," the committee said.

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Modiano was "well known in France, but pretty well not anywhere else." Born in 1945, Modiano has published some 30 books, mainly novels,  for which he is chiefly known -- but also some children's books and movie scripts.

His novels tend to be short, often 130 to 150 pages in length, and written in simple language, Englund said, but they are refined and elegant in nature.