NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
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Context:
The Nobel Prize for Literature 2022 has gone to French author Annie Ernaux, for, according to the Swedish Academy, “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
Details:
- Ernaux, 82, has seen a sharp increase in popularity in the English-speaking world since 2019, after her seminal work ‘The Years’, translated by Alison L Strayer, was shortlisted for the Man Booker international prize.
- Her book on her illegal abortion in the 1960s, ‘Happening’ (first published in 2001) has also been in the limelight after abortion rights were curtailed in the US.
- As the Nobel citation says, Ernaux’s work — ranging from a history of France to her first sexual experience and the shame around it to her mother’s illness and death to her abortion to her class-linked shame – meticulously mines her own memory and life experiences with “courage and clinical acuity”.
- Her treatment of her memories is unsparing but unembellished – she travels back to the moment she is writing about as completely as possible, without giving herself the benefit and wisdom of hindsight, putting on paper the raw vulnerability of the moment. As anchors, she uses songs, slogans, meals from the time she is writing about, which many say blurs the line between fiction and autobiography.
- Before the Nobel, Ernaux has won other awards and honours.
- According to her website, “Her works overall have received the French language prize and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize, as well as publication of her almost complete works to date in the Quarto edition by Gallimard in 2011 (Ernaux is the first woman writer to be published in this series in her lifetime).
- In 2014 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cergy-Pontoise.”
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