French writer Patrick Modiano has won the Nobel Prize for Literature as “a Marcel Proust of our time”, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.
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”.
Modiano’s works have centred on memory, oblivion, identity and guilt that often take place during the German occupation of World War Two.
“You could say he’s a Marcel Proust of our time,” Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told reporters.
Some of Modiano’s roughly 30 works include A Trace of Malice and Honeymoon. His latest work is the novel Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier.
Literature was the fourth of this year’s Nobel prizes. The prize is named after Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will.
Chemistry prize
Meanwhile, American scientists Eric Betzig and William Moerner and Germany’s Stefan Hell won the 2014 Nobel prize for chemistry for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, the award-giving body said on Wednesday.
“Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
Chemistry was the third of this year’s Nobel prizes. The prize is named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will. – Reuters