Tag: Gallimard

French author wins Nobel Prize for Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature was 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.”

Modiano was born in a west Paris suburb two months after the second world war ended in Europe in July 1945.

His father was of Jewish Italian origins and met his mother during the occupation of Paris and his beginnings have strongly influenced his writing.

Jewishness, the Nazi occupation and loss of identity are recurrent themes in his novels, which include 1968’s La Place de l’Etoile – later hailed in Germany as a key post-Holocaust work.

Modiano owes his first big break to a friendship with a friend of his mother, French writer Raymond Queneau, who first introduced him to the Gallimard publishing house when he was in his early twenties.

French writer says Anders Breivik was ‘what Norway deserves’

Richard Millet, 59, author of 50 books and editor at the famous Gallimard publishing house

Richard Millet, a respected French writer and editor, has sparked controversy for his comments on Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass killer, whom he described as “without doubt what Norway deserves”.

Breivik was last week sentenced to 21 years in prison for killing 77 people in a bomb attack and deadly shooting rampage that shook Norway.

Mr Millet, who says he has read all 1,500 pages of Breivik’s online manifesto, insists that he does not approve of the Norwegian gunman’s crimes.

However, he praised Breivik’s writing and cry of hatred for social democracy, immigration and multiculturalism.

“Breivik is without doubt what Norway deserves,” wrote Millet in an 18-page pamphlet.

He is “as much a child of a broken family as of an ideological and racial fracture caused by immigration from outside Europe over the last 20 years,” added Mr Millet, who has edited several award-winning books in France.

His writing about Breivik has sparked consternation in the literary circles, with one author Annie Ernaux calling the text “a politically dangerous act”.

Another author Tahar Ben Jelloun said: “He has lost his head.”

Others were less critical.

“He is still my editor,” said Alexis Jenni. “I don’t want to take any public position on the subject. Millet believes only in literature.

“He is someone who writes marvellously well. His questionable ideas do not reduce his literary qualities,” he argued.

Breivik was last week sentenced to 21 years in prison for killing 77 people in a bomb attack and deadly shooting rampage that shook Norway.

Source: AFP