PARIS (Reuters) – Claude Simon, the last French writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at the age of 91, Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres said on Saturday.

French media said Simon died in Paris on Wednesday but the news was kept private until after his burial on Saturday.

Donnedieu de Vabres hailed Simon, a writer of France’s so-called “nouveau roman” (new novel) movement alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, as a key figure in contemporary literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1985.

“This novelist incarnates the renewal of French literature in the post-war period,” he said of the author of “The Wind” (1957), and “The Flanders Road” (1960).

“Rejection of conventions, or rather, man’s fundamental originality, are at the heart of his work, the source of his creation,” he added, paying homage to Simon’s writing and his reputation in France and abroad.

Born in Madagascar in 1913, Simon was the son of a cavalry officer killed in World War One. Brought up by his mother in the southern French city of Perpignan, he studied in Paris and at Oxford and Cambridge and fought in World War II.

Captured by the Germans in May 1940, he escaped to join the French Resistance and completed his first novel “The Trickster” — about the 1940 collapse of France — in 1945.

He later settled in Perpignan and grew vines.

His writing often focuses on the permanence of objects and people that have survived through the upheavals of contemporary history.

A cycle of four books: “The Grass,” “The Flanders Road,” “The Palace” and “History,” contain recurrent characters and events.

His style mixes narrative with passages of stream of consciousness untroubled by punctuation — some of his sentences are 1,000 words long — but critics say his works remain readable despite their apparent difficulty.