Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022, and the announcement came on Thursday afternoon. The official Twitter handle of the Nobel Prize while making the announcement said, "The 2022 #NobelPrize laureate in literature Annie Ernaux believes in the liberating force of writing. Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean."
The announcement said that Ernaux has written with "great courage and clinical acuity" and has achieved something enduring by capturing the agony of the "experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring".
In light of having won one of the most prestigious awards in the world, here's a look at her life and work.
Who is Annie Ernaux?
In an interview in 2019, The Guardian described Ernaux as one of the greatest living writers in France in a profile in 2019. Ernaux, since she began writing in 1974, has written over thirty literary works and some have been translated into other languages. Her works spread over a time period of 40 years.
Her literary works are mostly autobiographical and have captured social differences and struggles through her own life experiences. Anders Olsson, the chairman of the Nobel Committee, The Swedish Academy, wrote in her biobibliography, "The ambition to rip apart the veil of fiction has led Ernaux to a methodic reconstruction of the past but also to an attempt to write a 'raw' type of prose in the form of a diary, registering purely external events."
Olsson noted that not only is the narrative voice in Ernaux's writing neutral and anonymised, but she also thinks of herself as an "ethnologist of herself" rather than a writer of fiction.
Ernaux often wrote about difficult personal experiences. Her first published work was Les armoires vides (1974; Cleaned Out, 1990), which was a fictionalised account of an illegal abortion she underwent in 1964, and her move from working-class to middle-class culture through education. This was followed by Ce qu'ils disent ou rien published in 1977, followed by La Femme gelée in 1981.
Her fourth novel named La place (1983; A Man's Place, 1992) was the portrait of her father. Olsson described it as her "literary breakthrough". "In a scant hundred pages she produced a dispassionate portrait of her father and the entire social milieu that had fundamentally formed him. The portrait employed her developing restrained and ethically motivated aesthetics, where her style has been forged hard and transparent. It flagged a series of autobiographical prose works one step beyond the imaginary worlds of fiction," Olsson wrote in her biobibliography.
The website of Ernaux run by the University of St Andrews says that among the main themes of her work are the body and sexuality, intimate relationships, social inequality and the experience of changing class through education. "In Ernaux's work the most personal, the most intimate experiences – whether of grieving, classed shame, nascent sexuality, passion, illegal abortion, illness, or the perception of time – are always understood as shared by others, and reflective of the social, political and cultural context in which they occur."
Awards and recognition
According to her website, Ernaux has been awarded the French language prize and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize for the book The Years (2008).
The English translation of the book was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. and was elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in 2021.
Happening, Audrey Diwan's film, based on Ernaux's book of the same won the Venice Golden Lion in 2021.
What was her early life like?
While she was born in Lillebonne, Normandy in 1940, she spent much of her growing-up years in Yvetot. Her parents ran a café and grocery shop in a working-class district of the town. Her website says, "She studied at a private Catholic secondary school in Yvetot, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time. In 1958, at eighteen, she left home for the summer to look after children in a summer camp (colonie de vacances)."
Ernaux studied at Rouen University, before becoming a secondary school teacher. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance.
On her struggles with class differences and becoming a celebrated author, she told The Guardian, "I was the only one in my mother's family who studied, and on my father's side there was one cousin who studied history. So writing to me was a way I could bring something. But I was wrong. I thought that if I wrote, I would avenge my whole people, but no, I would simply have succeeded as an individual. Nothing more, nothing less."