French author Annie Ernaux, who mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, was yesterday awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature for work that illuminates murky corners of memory, family and society.
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.
Photo: AP
Ernaux started out writing autobiographical novels, but quickly abandoned fiction in favor of memoirs.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said Ernaux had used the term “an ethnologist of herself” rather than a writer of fiction.
Her more than 20 books, most of them very short, chronicle events in her life and the lives of those around her. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents.
Olsson said Ernaux’s work was often “uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.”
“She has achieved something admirable and enduring,” he told reporters.
Ernaux describes her style as “flat writing” — aiming for a very objective view of the events she is describing, unshaped by florid description or overwhelming emotions.
In the book that made her name, A Man’s Place, about her relationship with her father, she writes: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally.”
Her 2000 novel Happening depicts the consequences of illegal abortion.
Her most critically acclaimed book is The Years, published in 2008 and describing herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the present day.
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