Annie Ernaux: ‘Uncompromising’ French author wins Nobel Literature Prize
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to French author Annie Ernaux for her “uncompromising” 50-year body of work that examines “a life marked by vast discrepancies regarding gender, language, and class.”
The coveted award, which is worth 10 million Swedish kronor (£807,000), is given out by the Swedish Academy. It was “a huge honour,” she remarked.
The committee’s leader, Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, praised the 82-year-work old’s as “admirable and enduring.”
In her semi-autobiographical works, he claimed she employed “courage and clinical clarity” to expose “the inconsistencies of social experience [and] convey shame, humiliation, jealousy, or the inability to know who you are.”
Her books, including A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, are considered to be contemporary classics in France.
Ernaux is the first French woman to win the literature prize, and told Swedish broadcaster SVT it was “a responsibility”.
“I was very surprised… I never thought it would be on my landscape as a writer,” she said. “It is a great responsibility… to testify, not necessarily in terms of my writing, but to testify with accuracy and justice in relation to the world.”
Over the course of her 20 novels, “she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life,” The New Yorker stated in 2020.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prizes have recognised excellence in literature, science, peace, and, more recently, economics. Abdulrazak Gurnah, a novelist from Tanzania, received the literary award the previous year.
Other winners have included playwrights Harold Pinter and Eugene O’Neill, as well as novelists Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison, poets Louise Gluck, Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky, and Rabindranath Tagore, and novelists Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison.
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