French Author Annie Ernaux Bags the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022

on Oct 07, 2022

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to French writer Annie Ernaux. The Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, announced the winner earlier today.

Annie was born in 1940 in the Normandy town of Yvetot, where her parents ran a grocery store and a cafe. Despite her difficult upbringing, she was ambitious. In her writings, the 82-year-old author often examined life from different angles that showcased disparities regarding gender, language, and class.

Les armoires vides (Cleaned Out, 1990) marked Ernaux's debut as a writer in 1970, with an examination of her Norman heritage. Her fourth book, La place (A Man's Place, 1992), published in 1983, was her breakthrough. According to a Nobel committee statement, "Her work is uncompromising and written in the simple, unadorned language. And when she reveals the agony of class experience, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy, or inability to see who you are with great courage and clinical acuity, she has accomplished something admirable and lasting."

Ernaux describes herself as an "ethnologist of herself" rather than a fiction writer. The majority of her works trace her parents' social progression from proletariat to bourgeois life. In her books, she has also mapped out several aspects of her own life.

Before joining the National Centre for Distance Learning in the 1970s, she taught at the Bonneville Lycée, the college of Evire in Annecy-le-Vieux, and then in Pontoise.

According to the Nobel laureate, writing is a political act that "opens our eyes to social inequality." "For this purpose, she uses language as "a knife," as she refers to it, to tear apart the veils of imagination," according to the Swedish Academy.