It is believed that the French novelist Annie Ernaux has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature. The 82-year-old writer is famous for her works which blur the lines between fiction and memoir.
In making the announcement the committee praised the “clinical sharpness in which she reveals the causes, the estrangements, and collective restrictions of memory.” The permanent secretary mentioned the fact that they were not reached by Ernaux to inform her about the award, which is worth around $900,000 U.S. dollars.
Ernaux was born in the year 1940 and was raised in France. Her first novel, Cleaned Out, in 1974, was an autobiographical novel about having an abortion while it was legal in France. The book was written in the privacy of her home. “My husband was a bit snarky of me when I first wrote my novel,” she told the New York Times in the year 2020. “I tried to pretend I was working on the Ph.D. thesis to have the time to be alone.”
This book came out in English in the year 1990.
In the press conference to announce the award ceremony, Anders Olsson, the chairman of the Nobel committee for literature, was asked if there was any motive to give the prize to someone who wrote such a personal essay about abortion. Olsson said no, stating that the committee’s focus is on literary excellence and literature. But, “it’s very important for us, too, that the laureate is of universal impact for her efforts. The fact that it is accessible to everyone.”
After years of digging up her personal history in various works, Ernaux published The Years which was widely viewed by critics as her definitive statement. The book was first published in 2008. The Year was a broad review of the society that shaped her. Although it focused on an analysis of every year of her life between 1940 and the year 2006 Ernaux did not use the word “I” instead opting for the more general “we,” or sometimes “she.”
When evaluating this 2017 English edition of The Years for the LA Review of Books, author Azarin Sadegh likened reading the book to scouring through old photos of family members.
“For the reader, the images of the past are revealed in broken forms and shapes filled with holes,” Sadegh writes. “You go through this collection of texts and images and you are immersed in the present. The years have passed and gone, but the majority of the time-spent moments that were captured in photographs and in part in memories are gone.”
In the year 2020, her book An American Girl’s Story was translated into English. It chronicled her early sexual experiences as a teenager and revealed the shame that was engendered by it all in the days before an era of sexual freedom.
Erneaux has the second book in the process of being translated into English to be released in 2023. The book is called “Look at the Lighting, My Love. According to the press announcement it’s a “meditation on the concept of the big-box superstore.” Naturally, it’s using the lenses of Ernaux’s personal memories.
Hi there, I’m Shakti Makvana. I like to write blogs on Entertainment, Sports, News and Technologies. Thanks for being here today!