Annie Ernaux has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her “uncompromising” 40-year body of work investigating “a life defined by significant gender, linguistic, and class differences.”
The Swedish Academy awards the honor, which is valued at 10 million Swedish kronor (£807,000).
She remarked that it was “a huge honor.”
The committee’s chairman, Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, described the 82-year-work old’s as “admirable and enduring.”
He claimed she utilized “courage and clinical acuity” to present semi-autobiographical stories that reveal “the inconsistencies of social experience” and convey shame, humiliation, jealousy, and the incapacity to perceive oneself.
In France, her works, particularly A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, are regarded as modern classics.
“freeing power of writing”
Ernaux was born in 1940 in Normandy, where her early life was “poor yet ambitious,” according to Prof. Heldin.
According to her website, she felt “shame of her working-class parents and environment” for the first time when she saw females from middle-class families.
That would eventually inform her novels. According to her official biography, her work focuses on “the body and sexuality; personal relationships; social disparity and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to document these life experiences.
After working as an au pair in London, Ernaux went on to study literature. She was married with two children and teaching in a French secondary school when her first novel was released in 1974.
Cleaned Out was a fictionalized account of her illegal abortion in 1964, which she concealed from her family.
She revisited this traumatic experience 25 years later for her book Happening, in which she “sifts over her memories and journal entries from those days.” It was adapted into a film that won the top award at the Venice Film Festival the previous year.
Prof Heldin continued: “Clearly, Annie Ernaux believes in the liberating power of writing. Her writing is uncompromising and written in the simple, unadorned language.”
The Years, another of Ernaux’s works, won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008 and the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016, and a year later she was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her whole body of work.
The Years was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019, with judges describing it as a “genre-bending masterwork.”
Booker stated at the time, “autobiography is given a new shape that is simultaneously subjective and impersonal, private and communal.”
Since 1901, the Nobel Prizes have been presented for achievements in literature, science, peace, and, more recently, economics. The literary award for the previous year was won by the Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison, poets such as Louise Gluck, Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky, and Rabindranath Tagore, and playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Eugene O’Neill are among the other winners.
