Updated 4:20 p.m. Moscow Time
STOCKHOLM, October 9 (RIA Novosti) – The Nobel Prize in Literature is being awarded to the French author Patrick Modiano, the award committee announced Thursday.
The author of "Missing Person" received the prize "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies,"according to a statement by the committee.
Modiano is well known in France but not so in other countries. His work has often focused on World War II. "Missing Person," one of his better known books, is about a detective trying to get back his lost memories.
The novelist has previously won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2012 and the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, a lifetime achievement award, from the Institut de France in 2010.
Candidates for this year"s Nobel Prize in Literature include American writer Philip Roth, Japanese writer Haruki Maruakami and Belarusian investigative journalist and novelist Svetlana Alexievich.
The Nobel Prize awards ceremony is scheduled for December 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896. Four of the five original prizes established by Nobel – for physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry and literature - as well as a memorial prize in economics, will be awarded in Stockholm, Sweden. The Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway.
The next Nobel prizes to be announced will be the Peace Prize on Friday and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel on October 13.
