Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western edge of Paris, in July 1945, weeks after the war in Europe ended. His father, of Italian-Jewish descent, had avoided deportation during the Occupation and dealt on the black market; his mother was a Flemish actress often away on tour. Raised partly by grandparents and in boarding schools, he grew close to his younger brother Rudy, whose death at nine marked him deeply; he dedicated his books to Rudy for fifteen years. As a teenager he took geometry lessons from Raymond Queneau, who opened the door to the literary world.

His first novel, La Place de l’Étoile (1968), confronted the Occupation and French antisemitism with mordant audacity. In more than forty books since, he has returned to the same territory: the shadowy Paris of the 1940s and the 1960s, half-remembered names, old telephone directories, photographs, police files. His narrators are investigators of their own pasts, and the novels — short, hushed, deliberately repetitive — are less mysteries to be solved than meditations on how identity dissolves. Missing Person, about a detective who has lost his memory, won the Prix Goncourt in 1978; Dora Bruder (1997) reconstructs from scant documents the life of a Jewish girl who ran away from a Paris convent school in 1941 and was deported. He also co-wrote Louis Malle’s film Lacombe, Lucien.

The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in 2014 for an art of memory that evokes elusive destinies and the life-world of the Occupation. Although celebrated in France, he was then little translated into English, and the prize brought a wave of new translations. Often likened to Proust for his obsession with time, he has continued to publish at a steady pace.