STOCKHOLM (AP) – French author Annie Ernaux, who dismantled her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for a work that explores dark corners of memory, family and society illuminated.
Ernaux’s autobiographical books explore deeply personal experiences and feelings – love, sex, abortion, shame – within a changing web of social and class relations. Much of her material comes from her childhood in a working-class family in Normandy, north-west France.
The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity” of her writing.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee on Literature, said Ernaux was “an extremely honest writer who is not afraid to face the hard truths”.
“She writes about things nobody else writes about, like her abortion, her jealousy, her experiences of being an abandoned lover, and so on. I mean, really tough experiences,” he said after the award ceremony in Stockholm. “And she puts these experiences into words that are very simple and powerful. They’re short books, but they’re really moving.”
Ernaux is just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel Prize winners in Literature and the first French literary prize winner since Patrick Modiano in 2014. One of France’s most garlanded authors and a prominent feminist voice, she expressed surprise at the award and asked a Swedish journalist who reached her by phone: “Are you sure?”
“I was working this morning and the phone kept ringing but I didn’t answer,” she told TT.
Ernaux told Swedish broadcaster SVT that the award was “a great honor” and “a very great responsibility”.
Olsson said Ernaux used the term “an ethnologist of herself” rather than a novelist.
Her more than 20 books, most of them very short, chronicle events in her life and the lives of those around her. They show uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the death of their parents.
Olsson said Ernaux’s work was often “written in plain language, scraped clean”.
Ernaux describes her style as “flat writing” – aiming to provide a very objective look at the events she is describing, uninfluenced by flowery descriptions or overwhelming emotions.
Ernaux worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book was Cleaned Out in 1974. Two more autobiographical novels followed – What They Say Goes and The Frozen Woman – before turning to more open autobiographical books.
In her 1983 book, La Place (A Man’s Place), she writes of her relationship with her father: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant irony. This neutral style of writing comes naturally to me.”
“Shame”, published in 1997, dealt with a childhood trauma, “Happening” from the year 2000 describes an illegal abortion.
Her most critically acclaimed book is The Years, published in 2008, in which she chronicled herself and broader French society from the end of World War II into the 21st century. Unlike previous books, Ernaux wrote in the third person in The Years, calling her character “she” instead of “I.” The book received numerous awards and honors, and Olsson said it was called “the first collective autobiography”.
2016’s A Girl’s Story follows a young woman’s coming of age in the 1950s.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has long been criticized for being too biased towards European and North American writers and too male-dominated. Last year’s winner, Tanzanian-born, UK-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, became only the sixth African-born Nobel Prize winner in literature.
“First and foremost, we’re trying to broaden the scope of the Nobel Prize, but our focus has to be on literary quality,” Olsson said.
Awards to Gurnah in 2021 and to American poet Louise Glück in 2020 helped the literary prize weather years of controversy and scandal.
In 2018, the award was postponed after allegations of sexual abuse rocked the Swedish Academy, which appoints the Nobel Literature Committee, and prompted an exodus of members. The academy has redesigned itself, but has faced more criticism for awarding the 2019 literary prize to Austrian Peter Handke, who has been described as an apologist for Serbian war crimes.
A week of Nobel Prize announcements began on Monday when Swedish scientist Svante Paabo received the Medicine Prize for unlocking the mysteries of Neanderthal DNA, which provided important insights into our immune system.
Three scientists jointly won the prize in physics on Tuesday. Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger had shown that tiny particles can remain connected to each other even when separated, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement and used in specialized computers and encryption of information can be used.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless and Danish scientist Morten Meldal for developing a “sticking molecules together” method that can be used to study cells, map DNA and develop drugs in a more targeted manner target diseases such as cancer.
The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Economics Prize on Monday.
The prizes are worth 10 million Swedish kronor (almost US$900,000) and will be presented on December 10th. The money comes from a legacy left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
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Jordans reported from Berlin and Lawless from London. Naomi Koppel in London, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this.
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