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.

French author Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for "the courage and clinical acuity" in her largely autobiographical books ...

Former French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot wrote on Twitter that Ernaux is "a writer who has put the autobiographical mode in its cold analytical way at the heart of her career. "She's been a very important contributor in terms of memoir and autobiographical work," Whittaker told Reuters. Readers in France said they'd been waiting for Ernaux to win. "I did not imagine at the time that 22 years later, the right to abortion would be challenged," Ernaux told reporters in Paris. "It's a long path that she makes in her life," Swedish Academy member Anders Olsson told Reuters. She has previously said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes to social inequality.

Swedish Academy cites 'the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory'

— This article originally appeared in [The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/06/books/nobel-prize-literature/nobel-prize-literature-winner) Ernaux first tried writing in college, but her book was rejected by publishers as “too ambitious,” she told the New York Times in 2020. Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo Editions, her British publisher, said he was “shaken, to be honest” by the news. He described Ernaux as “an exceptional and unique writer” who has for decades chronicled what it is like to be a woman in the 20th and 21st centuries. Rushdie, the Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children, was The books instead “offer a searing authenticity and reveal the slipperiness of much that we call memoir”. “I pretended to work on a PhD thesis to have time alone.” After the book was published, her husband reacted badly again. “He told me: If you’re capable of writing a book in secret, then you’re capable of cheating on me,” Ernaux said. “This is an autobiography unlike any you have ever read,” Edmund White wrote in a review of that book for the New York Times. Annie Ernaux first tried writing in college, but her book was rejected by publishers as ‘too ambitious’. She is the second woman to be given the prize in three years, after Louise Glück, who was In 2019 The Years was

French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender, has been awarded the Nobel ...

That is very specific to her, it's her special voice", he said. She went on to write a portrait of her mother in 1987, "A Woman's Story", which with "severe brevity" was a "wonderful tribute to a strong woman", the Academy noted. But it was her fourth book, "A Man's Place" from 1983 - a dispassionate portrait of her father and the social milieu that formed him - that started her literary breakthrough. [#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." Ms Ernaux, 82, was honoured "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory", the jury said. French President Emmanuel Macron hailed the award, calling Ms Ernaux's voice "that of the freedom of women and of the forgotten".

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

[#NobelPrize]laureate in literature Annie Ernaux believes in the liberating force of writing. The book received numerous awards and honours. Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. For this purpose she uses language as “a knife”, as she calls it, to tear apart the veils of imagination. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents. [#NobelPrize]laureate in literature Annie Ernaux has said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes for social inequality.

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.

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.

The French writer, who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, blurs the line between fiction and memoir with spare prose she has characterized as ...

[Happening](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/books/the-thing.html)” is an account of a back-alley abortion she had in 1963. To be in the pure immanence of a moment.” “ [A Girl’s Story](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/books/review/schrodingers-dog-martin-dumont-girls-story-annie-ernaux-finding-dora-maar-brigitte-benkemoun.html?searchResultPosition=4)” describes an adolescence shaped by a difficult sexual encounter and an eating disorder, and contrasts that with her sense of herself in her 70s. “There is absolutely no reason at all to hold back.” “The world is made to be pounced on and enjoyed,” she has written. Ernaux writes as if she’s walked quietly onstage with a guitar and a tiny, crackling amp, which she plugs in and proceeds, like P.J. To be there at that very instant, without spilling over into the before or after. Ernaux, 82, is the author of 20 or so works of fiction and memoir. Each looks out levelly at the world; each derives maximum effect from a minimum of words. The book’s tone is thin, bare and chapped, I wrote in my review of it, as if broadcast in mono instead of stereo, in the best sense. English-language readers have, in recent years, been racing to catch up. [who won the Nobel in 2020,](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/books/louise-gluck-nobel-prize-literature.html) hers is a voice of rough compassion.

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”.

Writer is the 17th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and 16th French citizen to do so.

Francophone letters speak to the world in a delicate language which is not the language of money.” Ernaux revisits her past without nostalgia, but with all the sensuality and emotional charge of the present moment. In Happening (2000), Ernaux recounted the illegal abortion she underwent in 1963. “Women have not become the equals of men in terms of liberty and power. At a press conference held by Gallimard, her publisher, Ernaux promised “to continue to fight injustice in all its forms”. Ernaux’s simple, crystalline style shuns lyricism in its exploration of the social dynamics and emotions of modern French life, while maintaining a thirst for social justice.

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,"