Annie Ernaux

The French author of mostly autobiographical work takes the prestigious books prize for the 'courage and clinical acuity' of her writing.

Previous winners include Bob Dylan, cited for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, and Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. Testard said Ernaux’s “literary project has been to write about her life and to get at the truth of it somehow … “Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean,” he continued. Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy. Reading her is to thoroughly purge yourself of the notion that shame could be a possible outcome of wanting sex.” Ernaux is the first French writer to win the Nobel since Patrick Modiano in 2014.

Writer, 82, is best known for works exploring female sexuality and the lives of women.

Ernaux understands that writing honestly about her parents is a form of betrayal – but she does it anyway.

(When he “reluctantly” switched from eating soup in the morning to drinking café au lait, he still used a spoon.) Her parents are rarely referred to as “my father” and “my mother”, but simply “he” and “she”. There are glimmers of intimacy in her accounts of her father’s precise shaving routine and the way in which his eating habits changed over the years. There is a felt distance here, in how Ernaux’s father treats her as a girl, and how she writes of him from the vantage point of her own adulthood. Her father mispronounced the name of her school teachers, “as if the normal pronunciation implied that he was intimate with the closed world that these words evoked, a liberty he was not prepared to take”. In A Man’s Place Ernaux writes not simply her own memoir but her father’s also, or some overlap of the two – the story of the man she understands him to have been, and how their relationship affected each other’s lives. Ernaux’s father grew up in a poor farming family in Normandy and the book begins with his death, which came exactly two months after Ernaux passed her exams for a teaching certificate.

French writer Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the panel said was an "uncompromising" 50-year body of work exploring "a life ...

It was turned into a film that For this purpose she uses language as “a knife”, as she calls it, to tear apart the veils of imagination. [wrote in 2020](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/a-memoirist-who-mistrusts-her-own-memories) that over her 20 books, "she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life". That would later feed into her novels. [#NobelPrize]laureate in literature Annie Ernaux has said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes for social inequality. Her parents ran a café and grocery shop, and when she encountered girls from middle-class backgrounds, she experienced the "shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time,"

She was cited for 'the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal…

They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents. The book received numerous awards and honours. It is also male-dominated, with just 16 women among its 118 laureates.

Writer and critic Catherine Taylor explains how the French writer became the 'great chronicler to a generation' • Annie Ernaux wins the 2022 Nobel prize in ...

Margaret Drabble has commented that “Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation” – now the great chronicler been justly rewarded with the greatest of literature prizes. (She would go on to teach in schools and university, from 1977-2000, alongside writing books.) A Man’s Place is very much part of what Ernaux calls the “lived dimension of history” – it is dispassionate about the life of a working-class man of his time, a struggling grocer with minimal education: “no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony,” she warns us. Nowhere is uncompromising style more apparent than in Ernaux’s account of the illegal abortion she had in 1963 as a student in Rouen. Her work as a whole is reflective, intimate – but also impersonal and detached. [shortlisted for the International Booker prize](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/09/man-booker-international-shortlist-dominated-by-women-authors-and-translators-olga-tokarczuk-annie-ernaux), that Ernaux has made a big impact on the anglophone world. The October announcement frequently has journalists and editors frantically Googling that year’s recipient – and perhaps a decade ago, Annie Ernaux might have received the same treatment.

Some prizes have gone to writers from outside mainstream literary genres, including French philosopher Henri Bergson in 1927, British Prime Minister Winston ...

Last year's prize, widely seen as the world's most prestigious literary award, was won by Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. [French](https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/iran-airs-video-2-french-citizens-arrested-spying) author Annie Ernaux won the 2022 [Nobel Prize](https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/russian-journalist-sells-nobel-prize-ukrainian-children) in Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory," the award-giving body said on Thursday. [#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] [October 6, 2022]

STOCKHOLM (AP) — French author Annie Ernaux, who has fearlessly mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, won this year's Nobel ...

Her most critically acclaimed book is “The Years,” published in 2008, which described herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal](https://apnews.com/article/science-health-stockholm-chemistry-fd3521c6436c94fd6dd73f4e53d86d09) for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895. Ernaux is the first female French Nobel literature winner and just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes. Last year’s prize winner, Tanzanian-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.” Her first book was “Cleaned Out” in 1974. “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. “And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking. While Macron praised Ernaux for her Nobel, she has been unsparing with him.

In her books the French author transmutes the private and the ordinary into something profound | Culture.

In Ms Ernaux’s hands, the supermarket trolley may become a vehicle of history. “A Woman’s Story” (1987), a searing account of her mother’s life and death from Alzheimer’s, helped secure her reputation in France. Translated by Alison Strayer, it won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in 2019 (of which your correspondent was a judge): to date, one of Ms Ernaux’s few honours in the Anglosphere. “I believe that desire, frustration and social and cultural inequality are reflected in the way we examine the contents of our shopping trolley or in the words we use to order a cut of beef,” she has said. Her book of 2016, “A Girl’s Story”, is typical of the French writer’s approach. Decades later, she returns to the city for a literary event; while her fellow delegates consume culture, she takes the Tube and plunges “back into my past life”.

The French author is the 17th woman to win the prize.

[The Years](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/556070/the-years-by-annie-ernaux/). Her breakthrough into the mainstream came with her fourth book, [A Man’s Place](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55507230-a-man-s-place). Last year, the book was adapted as a [feature-length film](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13880104/). The Swedish Academy has been criticized over the years for failing to recognize a diverse range of writers: Including Ermaux, 96 of the past 119 Nobel literature laureates have been either European or North American. The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, which is almost $900,000. She joins over a dozen French writers who have been honored with the award. But publishers rejected it for being “too ambitious,” she told the [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/books/annie-ernaux-a-girls-story.html)’ Laura Cappelle in 2020. “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. For years, the literary community has regarded Ernaux as a favorite for the accolade, which is awarded to an author for their entire body of work and is widely considered to be the greatest honor a writer can achieve. 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.” She found out when she heard the news on the radio, and stepped outside of her suburban Paris home to speak briefly with reporters on Thursday afternoon, reports Her work is lauded for its blistering honesty; the author has recounted her first sexual experiences, an illegal abortion, a passionate extramarital affair and the death of her parents, among other things.

Yes, awarding the Nobel Prize in literature to Ernaux, a chronicler of illegal abortion, is a political move. But it's also a victory for literature.

“I shall never hear the sound of her voice again,” she writes in the closing paragraph of “A Woman’s Story.” “It was her voice, together with her words, her hands, and her way of moving and laughing which linked the woman I am to the child I once was. In “The Years” (2008), Ernaux addresses the issue head on, seeking out “a language no one knows.” The solution she enacts explodes our preconceptions of voice and person, sliding between the singular and plural, using pronouns such as “we” and “she” while eschewing the memoir’s defining posture: “I.” One of the ways Ernaux develops this book is to circle back, more than once, to the opening sentence, using it as a kind of echo that punctuates the narrative. Both “A Woman’s Story” and its companion volume “A Man’s Place” (1983) represent cases in point. Such a move highlights not only the immediacy of writing as an act but also the emotions Ernaux can’t resolve. “It was only the day before yesterday that I overcame the fear of writing ‘My mother died’ on a blank sheet of paper, not as the first line of a letter but as the opening of a book.” [As I once wrote](https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-annie-ernaux-20180118-story.html) in these pages, Ernaux is ruthless, which is the highest praise I have to give. In more than 20 books, 15 of which have been translated into English, she has [effectively deconstructed](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-21-et-secondulin21-story.html) not just the memoir as a form but also the very question of memory and identity. At the same time, and as much as I support that intention, the choice of Ernaux as this year’s laureate is a victory for literature. She is not interested in taking narrative at face value or using it to blur or soften; there is not a sentimental sentence in her oeuvre. “Trace it all back,” she writes in “Cleaned Out,” “call it all up, fit it all together, an assembly line, one thing after another. I use the word reminiscence rather than memoir for a reason; Ernaux also resists the simplification of form.

French writer Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the panel said was an "uncompromising" 40-year body of work exploring "a life ...

It was turned into a film that For this purpose she uses language as “a knife”, as she calls it, to tear apart the veils of imagination. [wrote in 2020](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/a-memoirist-who-mistrusts-her-own-memories) that over her 20 books, "she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life". That would later feed into her novels. [#NobelPrize]laureate in literature Annie Ernaux has said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes for social inequality. Her parents ran a café and grocery shop, and when she encountered girls from middle-class backgrounds, she experienced the "shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time,"

Ernaux started out writing autobiographical novels, but quickly abandoned fiction in favor of memoirs. Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee ...

Unlike in previous books, in “The Years,” Ernaux writes about herself in the third person, calling her character “she” rather than “I”. The prizes to Gurnah in 2021 and U.S. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally.” Her 2000 novel “Happening,” depicts the consequences of illegal abortion. The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” She is the first French literature laureate since Patrick Modiano in 2014. Ernaux describes her style as “flat writing” – aiming for an very objective view of the events she is describing, unshaped by florid description or overwhelming emotions. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents.

The Nobel Prize in literature for 2022 was awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, ...

[Things Seen](https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803210776/), of which it said, “Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where ‘things seen’ reflect a private life meeting the larger world. “As the novel progresses, and Anne’s feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters evolve, she grows into a more mature but also more conflicted and unhappy character, leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years. The story, which takes place during the summer and fall of Anne’s transition from middle school to high school, is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style from her point of view.

Ernaux's novel Happening inspired Audrey Diwan's Venice Lion-winning title of the same name.

Ernaux’s debut novel was 1974 title Les Armoires Vides (Cleaned Out) but she gained international recognition following the publication of her 2008 book Les Années (The Years) that looked at both her personal life and French society at large from the end of World War II to the 21st century and won several awards and honours. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.” The film takes