Patrick Modiano wins Nobel Prize for Literature

This year's Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the French author Patrick Modiano "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation". The writer will receive eight million kronor (£693,000).

The 69-year-old Modiano's first book, La Place de l'Etoile, was published in 1968 and has yet to be published in English. He won the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1972 for Les Boulevards de Ceinture (Ring Roads) and the Prix Goncourt in 1978 for Rue des Boutiques Obscures, published in English as Missing Person. In 1974, he co-write with Louis Malle the screenplay for Lacombe Lucien, about a French boy who collaborates with the Nazis after being rejectged by the French Resistance.

He has published 27 books, eight of which have been translated into English.

The news was announced at noon today by the Swedish Academy. The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually since 1901 to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction".

Last year’s prize was awarded to Alice Munro. Seamus Heaney won the prize in 1995. The only other Irish writers to have been honoured were Samuel Beckett (1969), George Bernard Shaw (1925) and WB Yeats (1923). John Banville and William Trevor are the two contemporary Irish writers most widely mentioned as potential recipients of the prize.