STOCKHOLM: French writer Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature for works that made him “a Marcel Proust of our time” with tales often set during the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War Two, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.

Relatively unknown outside of France and a media recluse, Mr Modiano’s works have centred on memory, oblivion, identity and guilt. He has written novels, children’s books and film scripts.

The academy said the award of eight million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million) was “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”.

Little of his work is available in English but his roughly 40 works include “A Trace of Malice”, “Missing Person”, and “Honeymoon”. His latest work is the novel “Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier”.

Mr Modiano, 69, was born in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billan­court in July 1945, several months after the official end of the Nazi occupation in late 1944.

His father was Italian Jewish and his mother Flemish and non-Jewish. They met during the Occupation and that mixed heritage combined with moral questions about France’s relations with Nazi forces have played an important role in his novels.

“Ambiguity, this is one of the characteristics of his work,” said Dr Alan Morris, senior lecturer in French at Strathclyde University.

“There is an attempt to try and reconstruct some kind of story from the past, but it inevitably proves impossible.”

Mr Modiano has already won France’s prestigious Goncourt prize in 1978 for his work.

Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2014