She has been nominated as a candidate for years: Ernaux, born in Normandy in 1940, coined the term autofictionality with her project of measuring her origins and her life in a series of novels, which she has been pursuing for decades.
The Swedish Academy, responsible for the prestigious award, announced the choice on Thursday in Stockholm’s old town. Ernaux received the award “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the collective roots, alienations and limitations of personal memory,” Academy Permanent Secretary Mats Malm said in the award announcement. It has not yet been possible to reach her by phone, says Malm.
Decision for innovation in literature
The decision was taken in favor of an author whose position and innovative power for contemporary literature are indisputable. Autobiographical writing, especially by women, has long faced difficulties both in academia and with critics, regardless of the number of copies printed.
APA/AFP/Pierre Guillaud Ernaux at the launch of “La Place”, 1983
Ernaux eliminated this arrogance on his own, albeit silently at first. When he started writing in the shadows of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, he craved clarity, directness and minimalism. With “Der Platz” (“La Place”), she delivered a work in mid-1983 that is second to none.
In it, starting from the memory of her father’s death, she dissects her petty-bourgeois origins, retrospectively longs for the social “place” assigned to her by birth, and what opportunities were opened to her as a result or remained closed to her. . “The principle of fiction has always remained alien to me,” said Ernaux, looking back at “Der Platz” and added, “Reality is such an extraordinary field and life as lived is, ultimately, an enormous size.”
“Anthropologist of Herself”
In narrating, Ernaux also reflects on the limits of memory – and therefore the part of narration that is necessarily filled with fiction. It is precisely this duplication that is new and influential in his writing – and separates his autofiction from classical autobiographical approaches. Because of this approach, Ernaux also describes herself as “an ethnologist in her own right” – and reading her works did provide impetus. Didier Eribon, who also became famous in German-speaking countries with his sociological description of his childhood, “Return to Reims”, often refers to Ernaux as an inspiration.
Katja Gasser (ORF) at the Nobel Prize for Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Annie Ernaux. Katja Gasser analyzes the significance of this decision.
Ernaux has consistently expanded his approach since the 1970s: in novels such as “The Shame”, “Memoirs of a Girl” and “The Years” – which was explicitly recognized as the “first collective biography” when the Nobel Prize was announced and at the technical level of Marcel Proust – she processes aspects of her life and the lives of her family members.
With “A woman” (“Une femme”, 1987) Ernaux wrote a requiem for his mother, which allowed him to study literature, in “The shame” (“La honete”, 1997) she reconstructed the sometimes violent mother using a photo Her parents’ relationship and youth, in The Other Girl (L’autre fille, 2011) she related how in a conversation between her mother in 1950 she discovered that she had a sister who had died before she was born.
“Memoirs of a Girl” (“Memoire de fille”, 2016) accurately traced their first sexual encounter – and spoke of power, powerlessness and submission. “The Years” (“Les annees”, 2008) reads as the sum of her oeuvre – an exploration of her life from her post-war childhood, through her studies, her turbulent marriage and motherhood, to aging in the 1990s. , which at the same time opens up a wide panorama that the French company has delivered. Ernaux’s novels are a deep dive into a single life, opening general conclusions.
Increasingly translated around the world, her precise and poetic analyzes of gender and class relations reach the present, as does the Golden Lion for the film adaptation of her abortion novel “L’evenement” by director Audrey Diwan at the festival of cinema proved in Venice last year.
turmoil in previous years
In previous years, there has been great turmoil regarding the award: in 2019, the Peter Handke award was discussed in a highly controversial manner, and in 2018, the committee suspended the award following a major scandal over the sexual assault of a member of the jury. . The 2018 prize was only awarded in 2019 and awarded to Olga Tokarczuk.
The prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronor (about 920,000 euros), will be presented together with the other Nobel laureates on December 10th. The date is fixed as the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. Due to the pandemic, the award will again be presented in the recipients’ countries of origin and not at a ceremony in Stockholm.