French author Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday. The academy said it awarded Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she reveals the roots, alienations and collective limitations of personal memory”. In its statement, the academy noted that it had not yet been able to reach Erno. He later told Swedish broadcaster SVT that winning the Nobel Prize was “a great honor” and “a very big responsibility,” according to the Associated Press. Ernaux’s work often deals with issues of personal history. Her memoir “Happening” describes an illegal abortion she had in the 1960s. A 2018 translation of her memoir “The Years” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A translation of Ernaux’s “Getting Lost,” a diary of her relationship with a younger, married man, was released this year. Ernaux was born in 1940 in Normandy, the daughter of working-class parents. She published her first book, Cleaned Out, a fictionalized account of her abortion, in 1974. She has two sons and lives in Cergy, in the northwestern suburbs of Paris. He has won several French-language literary prizes, including the Prix Renaudot. In 1996, writer Linda Barrett Osborne wrote: “Annie Ernaux’s work can evoke the same response that some contemporary art does in viewers: a tendency to believe that, because it appears simple or direct in composition, it was simple to conceive, that everyone could create the same forms and impressions. On the contrary, at her best, Ernaux has the ability to refine ordinary experience, stripping it of irrelevance and deviance and reducing it to a kind of iconography of the late 20th-century soul.” Read more from Book World In “I Remain in Darkness,” Ernaux chronicled her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. Published in English in 2000 and translated by Tanya Leslie, the book “brilliantly conveys, with all the unconscious acuteness of real presence, the miseries and interdependencies, the frustration and fatigue, the toxic mixture of devotion and revulsion that characterizes so many of us the long process of losing an aging parent,” according to a Washington Post review. Yale University Press is set to publish a translation of Ernaux’s Look at the Lights, My Love in the fall of 2023. John Donatich, director of Yale University Press, said in a statement: “As a great admirer of Annie’s amazing work Ernaux, It is a special pleasure for me to see her receive this worldwide recognition. Her visionary nonfiction is a profound achievement and richly deserving of the wide readership this award will attract. These many new readers are about to make a wonderful discovery.” Ernaux’s work has also been adapted to film. “Happening,” directed by Audrey Diwan, received the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival, and 2020’s “Simple Passion” was a selection at the Cannes Film Festival. Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot directed “The Super 8 Years,” a 60-minute film made up of old domestic films that is to be shown at the New York Film Festival next week. New Democracy recently described Ernot as an “eternal trailblazer” for the Nobel Prize “who never crosses the line” but suggested that by selecting her, the academy could be “making a principled statement on reproductive rights”, especially given the work of “Happening”. Asked by the audience whether the choice was political, Helen Matson, a spokeswoman for the academy, said, “We focus on literature and literary quality,” before adding: “The message is that this is literature for everyone.” The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually by the 18-member Swedish Academy. It usually recognizes an author’s entire body of work, although the academy has singled out individual works of laureates on nine occasions. This year, the prize is worth about $913,000. The Nobel Prize was awarded to three scientists for work on click chemistry, which connects molecules quickly Nominations for the literary prize, kept confidential for 50 years, may be submitted by members of the academy and its peer institutions, professors of literature and linguistics, past laureates and presidents of national literary societies. A smaller committee narrows that list twice, ultimately giving the academy a list of five potential nominees each year. After reviewing and discussing the nominees’ works on this list, the academy selects a winner in October. Last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian-born novelist who writes primarily in English, won the prize. Awarded “for his uncompromising and compassionate insight into the effects of colonialism and the plight of the refugee on the divide between cultures and continents.” Responding to an audience question at the 2022 announcement about the overall focus of the Nobel Prize on European authors, Mattson said: “We have a lot of different criteria and you can’t satisfy them all.” Stressing again that literary quality was most important to the committee, he continued: “One year, we gave the award to a non-European writer, last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah. This year, we are giving the award to a woman.” Ernaux is the 17th woman to win the award. The 2022 awards ceremony will take place on December 10 in Stockholm. A note to our readers
