(Stockholm) French writer Annie Ernaux, who excerpted her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, received the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for her works that shed light on the dark corners of memory, of family and society.
Updated yesterday at 9:27
The 82-year-old author has been praised for the “courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory”. She is the first winner of French literature since Patrick Modiano in 2014.
Ernaux told Swedish broadcaster SVT by phone that the award was “a great honour” and “a very big responsibility”.
The author began by writing autobiographical novels, but quickly abandoned fiction in favor of memoirs.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature, mentioned that Ernaux described herself as “an ethnologist” rather than a writer of fiction.
Writing without compromise
His more than 20 books, most of them very short, relate events in his life and the lives of those around him. They present uncompromising portraits of her parents’ sexual encounters, abortions, illnesses and death.
Mr Olsson said Ernaux’s work was often “uncompromising and written in simple, uncluttered language”.
“She has achieved something admirable and lasting,” he told reporters after the announcement in Stockholm, Sweden.
Ernaux describes her style as “flat writing”, a very objective view of the events she describes, not shaped by flowery description or overwhelming emotions.
The book that made him famous is The place, in which she talks about her relationship with her father. In 2000, she published The eventwhich describes the consequences of illegal abortion.
His most critically acclaimed book is Years, published in 2008, in which she describes herself and French society from the end of the Second World War to the present day. Unlike previous books, in Years, Ernaux writes about herself in the third person. The book has received numerous awards and accolades.
Pricing controversies
Annie Ernaux is only the 17e woman among the 119 winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize has long been criticized for being too focused on European and North American writers, and on male authors.
Last year’s prize went to Tanzanian-born, UK-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose novels explore the impact of migration on individuals and societies. Gurnah was only the sixth winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature born in Africa.
“We are trying to broaden the scope of the Nobel Prize, but we must focus on literary quality,” defended Mr. Olsson.
The prizes awarded to Gurnah in 2021 and to American poet Louise Glück in 2020 helped the literature prize emerge from years of controversy and scandal.
In 2018, the award was postponed after sexual assault allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which appoints the Nobel Literature Committee. The academy had reorganized itself but faced further criticism for awarding the 2019 Literature Prize to Austrian Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.
Nobel Prize Week
A week of Nobel Prize announcements began on Monday with the Medicine Prize honoring Svante Pääbo, a scientist who unlocked the secrets of Neanderthal DNA.
Three scientists jointly won the physics prize on Tuesday. Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger demonstrated that tiny particles can maintain a connection with each other even when separated, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. , which can be used for specialized computing and to encrypt information.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless, as well as Danish scientist Morten Meldal, for developing a way to “glue molecules together”, which can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can more precisely target diseases like cancer.
The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Economics Prize on October 10.
The prizes come with a reward of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million) and will be presented on December 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
The main dates in the life of Annie Ernaux
Here are some dates in the life of writer Annie Ernaux.
— 1er September 1940: birth of Annie Duschesne in Lillebonne (Normandy).
— 1971: aggregation of Modern Letters.
— Summer 1958: “deflowering of shame” during a summer camp, told in girl memory.
— 1963: clandestine abortion, recounted in The empty cupboards.
— 1967: death of his father.
— 1974: publication of his first book, The empty cupboardsat Gallimard.
— 1977: move to Cergy-Pontoise. She became a professor at Cned, a distance learning center.
— 1980: then mother of two children, she divorced.
— 1984: Renaudot Prize for The place.
— 2019: Booker International Prize finalist for Yearsafter its translation into English.
— 2022: winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.