Nobel Prize for literature awarded to French writer Patrick Modiano

France's Patrick Modiano, whose work focuses on the Nazi occupation and its effect on his country, was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature last night.

The Swedish Academy gave the eight million kronor ($HK8.5 million) prize to Modiano "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation".

Parisian Modiano, 69, whose novel Missing Person won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978, was born in a west Paris suburb two months after the second world war ended in Europe in July 1945.

Modiano's father was of Jewish Italian origins and met his Belgian actress mother during the German occupation of Paris. 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 has published more than 40 works in French, some of which have been translated into English, including Ring of Roads: A Novel, Villa Triste, A Trace of Malice, and Honeymoon.