AKIPRESS.COM - Patrick Modiano, the French writer whose novels center on topics like memory, identity and guilt, won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, reports The Guardian.

In an announcement in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy cited Mr. Modiano’s ability to evoke “the most ungraspable human destinies in his work.”

Recent winners for the prize in literature have included the Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro in 2013; the Chinese novelist Mo Yan in 2012; the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer in 2011; and the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa in 2010.

The last American writer to win the Nobel in literature was Toni Morrison, in 1993. The Nobel, one of the most prestigious and financially generous awards in the world, comes with a $1.1 million prize. The literature prize is given out for a lifetime of writing rather than for a single work.