 His works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have been celebrated in and around France, but most of his novels had not been translated into English before he was awarded the Nobel Prize.Jean Patrick Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, a commune in the western suburbs of Paris on July 30, 1945.His father, Albert Modiano (1912–77, born in Paris), was of Jewish-Italian origin; on his paternal side he was descended from the well known Italo-Jewish Modiano family of Thessaloniki, Greece.