French author Annie Ernaux gets Nobel Prize in Literature 2022

NEW DELHI: This year’s Nobel Prize in literature 2022 has been awarded to French author Annie Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” The Swedish Academy announced the Nobel Prize 2022 in literature today.

In her writing, Ernaux examines a life marked by strong disparities related to gender, language and class. She has written over thirty literary works including portraits of her father, mother and personal life.

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The French writer has said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes for social inequality. She uses language as “a knife” to tear apart the veils of imagination.

“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,” said the official website of Nobel Prize.

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The 2022 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” pic.twitter.com/D9yAvki1LL

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2022

Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy, where her parents had a combined grocery store and café. “Her setting was poor but ambitious, with parents who had pulled themselves up from proletarian survival to a bourgeois life, where the memories of beaten earth floors never disappeared but where politics was seldom broached,” the website added.

Ernaux’s debut was Les armoires vides (1974; Cleaned Out, 1990), and she started her investigation of her Norman background already in this book, but it was her fourth book, La place (1983; A Man’s Place, 1992), that delivered her literary breakthrough. In 100 pages, she produced a “dispassionate” portrait of her father and the entire social milieu that had fundamentally formed him.

There is also a political dimension in Ernaux’s language. Her writing is always shadowed by a feeling of treason against the social class from which she comes.

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With her own words in her book Shame, Ernaux writes, “I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others.” Literature gives her a haven to write what is impossible to communicate in direct contact with others.

“Annie Ernaux manifestly believes in the liberating force of writing. Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals 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,” says Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee in her bibliography.