FRENCH WRITER ANNIE ERNAUX WINS 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE.

Kennedy Peretei.

French author and writer Annie Ernaux has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Justifying the award, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature Anders Olsson noted that “the clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory” stood her out. “It’s very important for us also, that the laureate has universal consequence in her work. That can reach everyone. The committee focuses on literature and literary quality” Olsson added.
The award is worth approximately $US900,000. The Committee as at the time of announcement has not reached Ernaux.

Annie Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yyetot in Normandy. She studied at Rouben University, and later taught at Secondary School. From 1977 to 2000, she was Professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance.

Ernaux’s work was first published in English by Seven Stories Press in the US, which was founded in 1995 by Dan Simon. The Press is named for the seven authors, Simon first published at Seven Stories Press, among them was Ernaux.

In the UK, independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions has published eight of Ernaux’s books, with another two on the way to be released next year.

Publisher Jacques Testard, commenting on the works of Ernaux said “she invents a form, does something genuinely new with literature; it’s an intersection of the novel and autobiography and non-fiction”. Ernaux’s ” literary project has been to write about her life and to get at the truth of it somehow…..l think she’s written about every important event in her life, from becoming aware of what social classes are as a child, to the death of her father and the death of her mother, to the illegal abortion she had in France in the 1960s to her first sexual experiences and then to writing about love and passion and desire. She’s been doing this for 50 years and there is a very genuine clarity to her work,” Testard added.

The originality and personal nature of her works have been described in certain quarters as lacking in shame.

Her debut was Les armoires vides, published in 1974 in France and as Cleaned Out in English in 1990. It was her fourth book, La place or A Man’s Place, that was her literary breakthrough.