To explore life in France since the 1940s this year on Thursday French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in literature for blending fiction and autobiography in books that fearlessly mine her experiences as a working-class woman.
Ernaux has probed deeply personal experiences and feelings – love, sex, abortion, shame within a society split by gender and class divisions over five decades in more than 20 books published.
“In power, it doesn’t seem to me that women have become equal in freedom” Ernaux said and to abortion and contraception she strongly defended women’s rights, after a half-century of defending feminist ideals.
At a news conference in Paris she said that “I will fight to my last breath so that women can choose to be a mother, or not to be. It’s a fundamental right”. Before it was legalized in France Ernaux’s first book, “Cleaned Out,” was about her own illegal abortion.
In her small-town background in the Normandy region of northwest France the prize-giving Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity” of books rooted.
Ernaux is “not afraid to confront the hard truths”, Chairman of the Nobel literature committee, Anders Olsson said.
He told The Associated Press after the award announcement in Stockholm “She writes about things that no one else writes about, for instance her abortion, her jealousy, her experiences as an abandoned lover and so forth. I mean, really hard experiences”.
“For these experiences that are very simple and striking she gives words. They are really moving but they are short books.”
“The novel of the collective and intimate memory of our country for 50 years Annie Ernaux has been writing. Emmanuel Macron, French President tweeted “the century’s forgotten ones and her voice is that of women’s freedom”.
She has poured scorn on Macron’s background in banking and said to advance the cause of French women his first term as president failed, while Macron praised Ernaux for her Nobel, she has been unsparing with him. A supporter of left-wing causes for social justice.
Including sexual encounters, illness and the deaths of her parents Ernaux’s books present uncompromising portraits of life’s most intimate moments. Ernaux’s work was often “written in plain language, scraped clean, Olsson said”. He said rather than a writer of fiction she had used the term “an ethnologist of herself”.
At Seven Stories Press Ernaux’s longtime American publisher, Dan Simon, said in the early years that, “she insisted that we not categorize her books at all. To refer to them as fiction she did not allow us and she did not allow us to refer to them as nonfiction.”
Ernaux has created “a genre of fiction in which nothing is made up”, Ultimately, he said. “She’s a great storyteller of her own life”. Simon said.
Ernaux worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book was “Les armoires vides” in 1974 (published in English as “Cleaned Out”). Two more autobiographical novels followed – “Ce qu’ils disent ou rien” (“What They Say Goes”) and “La femme gelée” (“The Frozen Woman”) – before she moved to more overtly autobiographical books.
In the book that made her name, “La place” (“A Man’s Place”), published in 1983 and about her relationship with her father, she wrote: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally.”
“In 1997 La honte” (“Shame”), published, explored a childhood trauma, while “L’événement” (“Happening”), from 2000, dealt like “Cleaned Out” with an illegal abortion.
In 2008 her most critically acclaimed book was “Les années” (“The Years”), published. It depicted Ernaux herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century, described by Olsson as “the first collective autobiography”. In 2019 for the International Booker Prize its English translation was a finalist.
She is a woman from a working-class background because Ernaux has described facing scorn from France’s literary establishment.
To diversify its range, drawing on experts in literature from different regions and languages Olsson said the academy was working.
“It is the quality that counts but we try to broaden the concept of literature, ultimately”, he said.
With the Nobel’s cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) Ernaux said she wasn’t sure what she would do.
To Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded on Wednesday and for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” Danish scientist Morten Meldal that to target cancer and other diseases can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs.
The economics award was announced on Monday and The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be on Friday.
On Dec. 10 the prizes will be handed out. The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prime’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
Keyton reported from Stockholm and Lawless from London. In Clergy, France Masha Macpherson; John Leicester in Le Pecq, France; in Berlin Frank Jordans; in London Naomi Koppel; Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.