Modiano, Patrick (1945-…), a French novelist, won the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature. He is best known for novels about French life during the German occupation of France in World War II (1939-1945), a difficult time in the country’s history.
Modiano’s fiction centers on the themes of loss, memory, and identity. Many of his stories are set in Paris during the occupation, and they explore the ways many French citizens either passively accepted the Germans or actively collaborated with them. Another important theme in his work is the Holocaust—that is, the systematic, state-sponsored murder of about six million European Jews and others by the Nazis. Modiano gained attention with his first novel, La Place de l’Etoile (1968). The novel, set in Paris during the German occupation, is considered a major work of Holocaust literature. Dora Bruder (1997, translated into English as Dora Bruder, 1999, and as The Search Warrant, 2000) is based on the true story of a 15-year-old Jewish girl in Paris who was killed in the Holocaust.
Modiano’s novels frequently have a strong autobiographical element and are written in a direct and subtle style. The author sometimes draws on interviews and newspaper articles in assembling his stories. He is interested in blurring the lines between fact and fiction, and between remembering and forgetting. Modiano won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most important literary award, for his novel Missing Person (1978), a story about a detective who has lost his memory and whose final case is trying to discover who he really is.
Jean Patrick Modiano was born on July 30, 1945, in Boulogne-Billancourt, a Paris suburb. His father was of Jewish-Italian background and his mother was Belgian. While Modiano was a high school student in Paris, one of his teachers was the popular French author Raymond Queneau, who played a major role in Modiano’s early writing career.
Modiano’s other novels in English translation include Night Rounds (1971), Ring Roads (1974), A Trace of Malice (1988), Honeymoon (1990), Out of the Dark (1998), Sleep of Memory (2018), and Scene of the Crime (2023). In addition to his novels, Modiano has written children’s books and was the co-author of the screenplay for the French World War II motion picture Lacombe, Lucien (1974). This award-winning film tells the story of a teenage peasant who collaborates with the Germans occupying France, but then falls in love with a young Jewish woman. Modiano also wrote a highly praised memoir, Un Pedigree (2004), in which he expresses deep sadness over his brother’s death from illness at the age of 10 and his sense of abandonment by his parents.
