Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to the writer Annie Ernaux

The bookmakers announced her as the winner, and they were right: writer Annie Ernaux arrives receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is the seventeenth woman and the sixteenth French to win the prestigious award, and so happens to the Tanzanian novelist Abdelrazak Gurnah (awarded in 2021), eight years after Patrick Modiano, the last French to win the prize in this category.

Annie Ernaux crowned with the Nobel Prize in Literature

After The young man (2022), her latest and moving novel, the author is awarded for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, distances and collective bonds of personal memory”, the Nobel jury specifies.

An award that crowns an important work that has lasted for more than forty years during which it has never stopped moving the lines. A committed writer, Ernaux has largely contributed to the evolution of French literature by bringing to the fore hitherto unknown issues such as abortion, class domination or even the RER, themes that run through her own experience and her origins.

Intellectual icon of a generation

It is this, but also and above all a demanding writing that wants anything but empty, that constitutes Ernaux’s pen. A literary approach that places her in the autobiographical genre, which he has always rejected. A writing that speaks of a woman, herself, but who above all manages to achieve her goal, that of making personal emotions universal and giving the experiences she tells a collective experience. As an x-ray of the evolution of our society and of an entire generation, crossed by the story of the experience of being in the world when one is a woman, through, in particular, the body or even violence.

Essential writer in France, she is, as suggested The worldprobably became “ennobleizable” when his masterpiece Yearspublished in France in 2008, it was translated into English in 2018.

Placing his work at the crossroads of literature, sociology and history (for a long time he was interested in the work of Pierre Bourdieu), Ernaux gradually became, at the age of 82, the essential icon of a whole generation of feminists and intellectuals.

Photo of one: Youtube screenshot