French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender, won the 2022 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday.
She was honored “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
Ernaux, whose work is mostly autobiographical, is 82.
In explaining its choice, the Swedish Academy said Ernaux “consistently, and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class”.
“I was very surprised… I never thought it would be on my landscape as a writer,” Ernaux said. “It is a great responsibility… to testify, not necessarily in terms of my writing, but to testify with accuracy and justice in relation to the world.”
Over some 20 books, many of which have been school texts in France for decades , she has unsparingly examined one of the country’s great taboos, class, often through the prism of her own life.
In so doing, she has become a trailblazer for a whole generation of French writers from tough and immigrant backgrounds.
Her books are the grit in the French literary oyster, offering an alternative, as she puts it, to the “unconditional admiration for the pretty phrase”.
They have also made it to the screen, with Happening, adapted from her own semi-autobiographical work about having an illegal abortion, nominated for a Bafta award in 2022.
Outside France, recognition for her work has only come in recent years, notably after the English translation of her key 2008 work, The Years, which was nominated for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2019.
In it, Ernaux used family photos, as well as scraps of popular culture, to recall her life and explore the impact of bigger historical events.
Personal experiences are the source for all Ernaux’s work, and she is the pioneer of France’s “autofiction” genre, which gives narrative form to real-life experience.
“When I write, I do not have the impression of looking inside me. I look inside a memory,” she once said.
SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES