French · b. 1945
Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014 for "the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation." The French author has written over thirty novels, nearly all circling Vichy France and its collaborations, its disappearances, its unspoken guilt. "Missing Person" (1978) won the Prix Goncourt; "Dora Bruder" (1997) traces a real Jewish girl deported to Auschwitz. Modiano's prose is simple; his obsessions are inexhaustible.