The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature has been given to French writer Annie Ernaux. The 82-year-old author is well-known for works that straddle the boundary between memoir and fiction.
The committee cited her “clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” During his statement, the permanent secretary also stated that they had been unable to contact Ernaux to inform her of the prize, valued at nearly $900,000 in US dollars.
Ernaux was born in France in 1940. Cleaned Out, her first book was published in 1974 and was an autobiographical story about procuring an abortion while it was still illegal in France. She authored the book covertly. “My husband had made fun of me after my first manuscript,” she told the New York Times in 2020. “I pretended to work on a PhD thesis to have time alone.”
In 1990, the novel was translated into English.
At the announcement news conference, Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee for literature, was questioned if there was a political motivation for awarding the prize to someone who has written so personally about abortion. Olsson declined, stating that the committee is concerned with literature and literary excellence. Having said that, “it’s very important for us also that the laureate has a universal consequence in her work. That it can reach everyone.”
Ernaux released The Years, which many reviewers considered as her defining statement, after decades of unearthing her own past in several works. The Years, first published in 2008, was a comprehensive study at the civilization that gave birth to her. Ernaux eschewed using the pronoun “I” in favor of a larger “we,” or occasionally “she,” in her assessment of each year of her life from 1940 to 2006.
Azarin Sadegh, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, described reading The Years in English as going through old family pictures.
“For the reader, the images of the past reveal themselves in broken shapes and forms with holes all over,” Sadegh writes. “You leaf through this pile of images and texts and feel immersed in the past. The years have come and gone, and most of the moments lived — captured only in photos and partially in memory— have vanished.”
Her novel A Girl’s Story was translated into English in 2020. It brought back her early adolescent sexual encounters and unearthed the humiliation of it all right before the sexual revolution.
Look at the Lights, My Love, by Erneaux, is being translated into English and released in 2023. It’s a “meditation on the phenomenon of the big-box superstore.” Of course, through the lens of Ernaux’s own memory.