The French writer Annie Ernaux is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
PARIS (AP) — French author Annie Ernaux won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for mixing fiction and autobiography in books that fearlessly drew on my experiences as a working-class woman to explore life in France since the 1940s.
In more than 20 books published over five decades, Ernaux has explored deeply personal experiences and emotions—love, sex, abortion, shame—within a society divided by gender and class.
After half a century of championing feminist ideals, Ernaux said “it doesn’t seem like women have become equal in freedom and power,” and she strongly defended women’s rights to abortion and contraception.
“I will fight to my last breath so that women can choose to be a mother or not. It is a fundamental right,” she said at a press conference in Paris. Ernaux’s first book, “Issued”, was about her own illegal abortion before it was legalized in France.
The award-giving Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for the “courage and clinical acuity” of books rooted in her small-town background in the Normandy region of northwestern France.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Literature Committee, said Ernaux “is not afraid to confront the hard truths.”
“She writes about things that no one else writes about, such as her abortion, her jealousy, her experiences as an abandoned lover and so on. I mean, really difficult experiences,” he told The Associated Press after the award announcement in Stockholm. “And she gives words to these experiences which are very simple and striking. They are short books, but they are really moving.”
French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “For 50 years Annie Ernaux has written the novel of the collective and intimate memory of our country. Her voice is the freedom of women and the forgotten of the century.”
While Macron praised Ernaux for her Nobel, she has been implacable with him. A supporter of left-wing social justice goals, she has poured scorn on Macron’s background in banking and said his first term as president failed to advance the cause of French women.
Ernaux’s books present uncompromising portraits of life’s most intimate moments, including sexual encounters, illness and the death of her parents. Olsson said Ernaux’s work was often “written in plain language, scraped clean.” He said she had used the term “an ethnologist of herself” rather than a fiction writer.
Dan Simon, Ernaux’s longtime American publisher at Seven Stories Press, said that in the early years she “insisted that we not categorize her books at all. She wouldn’t allow us to refer to them as fiction and she wouldn’t allow us to refer to them as non-fiction.”
Ultimately, he said, Ernaux has created “a genre of fiction where nothing is made up.”
“She’s a great storyteller about her own life,” Simon said.
Ernaux worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book was “Les armoires vides” in 1974 (published in English as “Cleaned Out”). Two more autobiographical novels followed – “Ce qu’ils disent ou rien” (“What They Say Goes”) and “La femme gelée” (“The Frozen Woman”) – before she moved on to more overtly autobiographical books.
In the book that bore her name, “La place” (“A man’s place”), published in 1983 and about her relationship with her father, she wrote: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant irony. This neutral style of writing comes naturally to me.”
“La honte” (“Shame”), released in 1997, explored a childhood trauma, while “L’événement” (“The Happening”), from 2000, like “Cleansed” dealt with an illegal abortion.
Her most critically acclaimed book is “Les années” (“The Years”), published in 2008. Olsson described it as “the first collective autobiography”, depicting Ernaux herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century. Its English translation was a finalist for the International Booker Prize 2019.
Ernaux’s “Mémoire de fille” (“A Girl’s Story”), from 2016, follows a young woman’s coming of age in the 1950s, while “Passion Simple” (“Simple Passion”) and “Se perdre” (“Getting Lost”) charting Ernaux’s intense affair with a Russian diplomat.
Ernaux has described facing derision from France’s literary establishment because she is a woman from a working-class background.
“My work is political,” she said at the press conference. She described growing up in a non-elite environment, a world of “people above you” and the seeming impossibility of becoming a famous writer.
The literature prize has long faced criticism for being too focused on European and North American writers, as well as being too male-dominated. Last year’s laureate, the Tanzanian-born British author Abdulrazak Gurnah, was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa.
More than a dozen French writers have won the prize for literature, although Ernaux is the first French woman to win, and only the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel Literature laureates.
Olsson said the academy was working to diversify its offerings, using experts in literature from different regions and languages.
“We are trying to broaden the concept of literature but it is the quality that counts in the end,” he said.
Ernaux said she was not sure what she would do with the 10 million Swedish kronor (almost $900,000) Nobel prize.
“I have a problem with money,” she told reporters. “Money is no goal for me. … I don’t know how to spend it well.”
A week of Nobel Prize announcements began on Monday with the Swedish researcher Svante Paabo receiving the prize in medicine to unlock secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided important insights into our immune system.
The Frenchman Alain Aspect, the American John F. Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger won the physics prize on Tuesday for work showing that tiny particles can maintain a connection with each other even when they are separated, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to the Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless and the Danish scientist Morten Meldal to develop a way to “snap molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs to target cancer and other diseases.
The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics prize on Monday.
The prizes will be awarded on 10 December. The prize money comes from a will left by the prize’s creator, the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
___
Keyton reported from Stockholm and Lawless from London. Masha Macpherson in Clergy, France; John Leicester in Le Pecq, France; Frank Jordan’s in Berlin; Naomi Koppel in London; Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.
___
Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prize at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes