Patrick Modiano was born in an outlying quarter of Paris in 1945. He published his first novel, La Place de l'Étoile, when he was 21, and has made a distinguished career as a novelist ever since, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014. He has won the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française and the Prix Goncourt. His fiction is haunted by the trauma of the German Occupation of France, and this subject also features in the screenplay of Lacombe Lucien which he wrote for the film director Louis Malle.Joanna Kilmartin is the translator and editor of Marcel Proust's Selected Letters: Volume Four, 1918–1922. She has been awarded the Scott-Moncrieff translation prize twice: in 1971 for Sunlight on Cold Water by Françoise Sagan, and in 1974 for Bernadini's Terrace by Suzanne Prou.