French writer Annie Ernaux paid tribute to French literary giant Albert Camus on Saturday evening after receiving his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, 65 years after the author of The stranger.
During her speech of thanks at the grand banquet celebrating the 2022 laureates in the Swedish capital, the 82-year-old author expressed her “gratitude” for being listed alongside Camus, Nobel Literature 1957.
“Finding myself here, sixty-five years later, leaves me with a deep sense of astonishment and gratitude,” declared Annie Ernaux to the 2,000 guests gathered at Stockholm City Hall.
“Amazement at the mystery represented by a path of life and a hazardous, solitary pursuit of writing. Gratitude for allowing me to join Camus, and these late or contemporary writers that I admire,” she said.
Mme Ernaux, the first French woman to win the supreme award after fifteen French people, also greeted “those who are not here, these men and women who have sometimes found in my books reasons to live and to fight, to feel more proud “.
“By rewarding my work, you force me to be even more demanding in the search for a reality and a shareable truth”, she said, her voice imbued with emotion.
Along with the other “Swedish” Nobel laureates (medicine, physics, chemistry and economics) announced in October, she received her prize earlier in the afternoon from the hands of the King of Sweden, during the traditional ceremony organized in Stockholm. .
The Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian laureates of the peace prize have called for them not to lower their arms against the “crazy and criminal” war that Vladimir Putin has launched in Ukraine.
From the three main protagonist states in the conflict, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), the Russian NGO Memorial, dissolved by order of the courts, and the Belarusian activist Ales Beliatski, imprisoned in his country, were crowned for their commitment to “human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence” in the face of authoritarian forces.
“Peace for a country under attack cannot be achieved by laying down arms,” said CCL leader Oleksandra Matviïtchouk. “It would not be peace, but occupation. »