Patrick Modiano

Origins and early life

Jean Patrick Modiano, born in Boulogne-Billancourt on 30 July 1945, is the son of Albert Modiano, a Parisian of Italian-Jewish origin descended from the Modiano family of Thessaloniki, and of the Flemish actress Louisa Colpeyn — his card, as this directory requires, says plainly that he belongs here through his father.

Work and career

That father lived the Occupation without wearing the yellow badge and without turning himself in when the Jews of Paris were rounded up for deportation, and that shadowed time became the matter of nearly all the son's books. From his first novel, La Place de l'Étoile (1968), about a Jewish collaborator, to Rue des boutiques obscures, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1978 with its amnesiac narrator hunting his own past, he has returned again and again to the same wound.

Dora Bruder, reconstructed from the traces of a fifteen-year-old daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who ran away in occupied Paris, Modiano has circled memory, identity and guilt through more than forty books translated into over thirty languages. He received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature.