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Annie Ernaux is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature

October 6, 2022

This story has been updated.

French author Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday.

The academy said it awarded Ernaux the prize “for the courage and clinical acumen with which she discovers the roots, the remoteness and the collective constraints of personal memory”. In its announcement, the academy noted that it had not yet been able to join Ernaux. She then told Swedish television SVT that winning the Nobel Prize was a “great honor” and “a very big responsibility”, according to the Associated Press.

Ernaux’s work frequently deals with questions of personal history. Her memoir “Happening” is about an illegal abortion she had in the 1960s. A 2018 translation of her memoir “The Years” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A translation of Ernaux’s “Getting Lost”, a diary of her affair with a young married man, was published this year.

Ernaux was born in 1940 in Normandy, the daughter of working-class parents. She published her first book, “Cleaned Out”, a fictionalized account of her abortion, in 1974. She has two sons and lives in Cergy, in the northwestern suburbs of Paris. She has won several French-language literary prizes, including the Renaudot prize.

In 1996, author Linda Barrett Osborne wrote: “The work of Annie Ernaux can evoke the same reaction as some modern art in viewers: a tendency to think that, because it appears simple or direct in its composition, it was simple to design, that anyone could create the same shapes and impressions. Instead, at his best, Ernaux has the ability to refine ordinary experience, stripping it of all relevance and digression and reducing it to a sort of late 20th century iconography of the soul. century.

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In “I Remain in the Darkness”, Ernaux chronicled his mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s disease. Released in English in 2000, and translated by Tanya Leslie, the book “brilliantly details, with all the unconscious acuity of the real presence, the miseries and the interdependencies, the frustration and the boredom, the toxic mixture of devotion and revulsion that has characterized so many of us for so long the long process of losing an aging parent,” according to a Washington Post review.

Yale University Press is expected to publish a translation of Ernaux’s “Look at the Lights, My Love” in the fall of 2023. John Donatich, director of Yale University Press, said in a statement: “As a great admirer of the extraordinary work by Annie Ernaux, it is a particular pleasure for me to see her receive this worldwide recognition. Her visionary non-fiction is a profound achievement, and it richly deserves the wide readership that this award will attract. These many new readers are on about to make a marvelous discovery.

Ernaux’s work has also been adapted for the cinema. An adaptation of “Happening,” directed by Audrey Diwan, received the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival, and 2020’s “Simple Passion” was a Cannes Film Festival selection. Ernaux is also a filmmaker. “Les Super 8 ans” is a 60-minute film that she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot made up of old amateur films. She will present the film at the New York Film Festival next week.

The New Republic recently described Ernaux as “a perennial favourite” for the Nobel Prize “who never quite crosses the line”, but suggested that by selecting her, the academy could “make a statement of principle about the reproductive rights,” especially given her job. in “The Event”. In response to a question from the audience about whether the choice was political, Ellen Mattson, an academy representative, said, “We focus on literature and literary quality,” before adding, ” The message is that it’s literature for everyone.”

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually by the 18-member Swedish Academy. It generally recognizes an author’s body of work, although the academy has singled out individual works by winners on nine occasions. This year, the prize is worth approximately $913,000.

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Nominations for the literature prize, which are kept secret for 50 years, can be submitted by members of the academy and its counterpart institutions, professors of literature and linguistics, former laureates and presidents of national literary societies. . A small committee narrows this list twice, ultimately providing the academy with a list of five possible candidates each year. After reviewing and discussing the work of the nominees on this list, the academy selects a winner in October.

Last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian-born novelist who writes primarily in English, won the prize. It was granted “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the plight of the refugee in the chasm between cultures and continents”.

In response to a question from the audience at the 2022 announcement about the general focus of the Nobel Prize on European writers, Mattson said, “We have many different criteria, and you can’t meet them all.” Stressing again that literary quality was most important to the committee, he continued: “One year we awarded the prize to a non-European writer, last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah. This year, we are giving the award to a woman. Ernaux is the 17th woman to win the award.

The 2022 awards ceremony will take place on December 10 in Stockholm.

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