French writer Annie Ernaux received the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to her by the Swedish Academy “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, alienations and collective brakes of personal memory”.
Ernaux is 82 years old and the author of short autobiographical novels. In Italy, she has been “rediscovered” in recent years along with many other authors and book authors who tell “true stories”. It happened in 2015 when the L’orma publishing house published Gli anni, in which the events of the writer’s life are placed in the history of France. This book, perhaps his best-known work in Italy, begins with the phrase “All images will disappear”; follows a list of several memoirs by the author, and then:
They will all disappear in one fell swoop, like the millions of images that have been behind the foreheads of the deceased grandparents, their dead parents for half a century, have disappeared. Images in which we too, little girls, appeared among other beings who disappeared even before we were born, just as we remember our little children with their grandparents, our school friends, who are already deceased. And so one day we will be in the memories of children among grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never ends. Let the dead appear to the living, real beings to the imaginary, the dream of history.
With the award of the Nobel Prize, she was credited with being able to analyze the disparities of “gender, language and class” in their different effects on a single life, hers.
Among his books published in Italian are The Frozen Woman (1981), dedicated to the imbalances between man and woman in a marriage of the time, L’altra Daughter (2011), which speaks of Ernaux’s discovery of the existence of a sister who died before she was born and L’evento (2000), on which the film of the same name was based, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. The latter speaks of the secret abortion that Ernaux had in his youth. The author’s latest book to be published in Italian is Guarda le luci, amore mio (2014), which collects observations from one of the most modern yet least literary places imaginable: a hypermarket.
Ernaux’s victory is excellent news for L’orma, a small publishing house that has existed since 2012 and whose notoriety among Italian readers is closely linked to the success of this author. In fact, Ernaux’s books have sold thousands of copies in recent years. The best-selling – and therefore most read, one imagines – is Gli anni, which has sold around 50,000 copies to date. Sales of Ernaux’s books are likely to increase significantly in the coming months, as is almost always the case with Nobel Prize winners.
The last Nobel Prize in Literature to be awarded to a Frenchman is that of Patrick Modiano in 2014. Before him, fifteen other Nobel Prizes in Literature had been awarded to French people – all of them men. France is the country that has received the most in the 121-year history of the award.
The video of the announcement
The Nobel Prize in Literature is one of the most prestigious literary awards and has been awarded since 1901. Over time it has been awarded 115 times to 119 people (multiple times double), 102 men and 17 women, including Ernaux. The country with the most Nobel Prizes in Literature after France is the United States (13), followed by the United Kingdom (13), Germany (9) and Sweden, which awards recognition through the Swedish Academy (8). . . . In terms of language dissemination, 29 Nobel Prizes have been won by English-speaking authors, 16 by French-speaking authors, 14 by German-speaking and 11 by Spanish-speaking authors, with the other languages to follow.
In 2021, the prize went to Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian novelist and literary scholar who is little known outside of literary circles.