French historical author Patrick Modiano has won the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature.
The Nobel Academy described the novelist, whose work has often focused on the Nazi occupation of France, as "a Marcel Proust of our time".
The award - presented to a living writer - is worth eight million kronor (£691,000).
Previous winners include literary giants such as Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway. The last French writer to win the prize was Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio in 2008.
Modiano came out ahead of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o.
The academy said the award was "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation".
Modiano, 69, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, a suburb of Paris, to a businessman father and an actress mother.
His debut novel, La Place de l'Etoile, was published in 1968 but, more than 40 years later, has yet to be translated into English. Many of his other works have been translated into English, among them Les boulevards de ceinture (1972; Ring Roads : A Novel, 1974), Villa Triste (1975; Villa Triste, 1977), Quartier perdu (1984; A Trace of Malice, 1988) and Voyage de noces (1990; Honeymoon, 1992).
His most recent novel is Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier (2014).
Modiano, who lives in Paris, rarely give interviews. The Nobel Academy said it had been unable to tell the author the news before the announcement.
A total 111 individuals have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1901 to 2014.
Last year's winner was Canadian author Alice Munro.
SOURCE: BBC
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