2022 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner Announced

The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize successful Literature to French writer Annie Ernaux for “the courageousness and objective acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and corporate restraints of idiosyncratic memory.” Ernaux is the writer of implicit 30 works of fabrication and memoir and is considered by galore to beryllium France’s astir important literate voice. At the clip of Thursday’s property league the Nobel committee said they had not yet been capable to scope Ernaux connected the phone.

Born successful 1940, Ernaux grew up successful the tiny municipality of Yvetot successful Normandy, wherever her parents had a combined market store and café. Chair of the Nobel Committee, Anders Olsson, stated during Thursday’s property league “Her mounting was mediocre but ambitious, with parents who had pulled themselves up from proletarian endurance to a bourgeois life, wherever the memories of beaten world floors ne'er disappeared but wherever authorities was seldom broached. In her writing, Ernaux consistently and from antithetic angles, examines a beingness marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language, and class.”

Her works of fabrication propulsion profoundly from her ain beingness and experiences, truthful overmuch truthful that she has declared herself an “ethnologist of herself” alternatively than a writer of fiction. Ernaux has besides said that penning is simply a governmental enactment and she uses connection “as a knife” to “tear isolated the veils of imagination” and unfastened readers to a wider designation of societal inequality.

Ernaux won the Prix Renaudot for A Man’s Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her assemblage of work. She received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women successful Translation for The Years, which was besides shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her astir caller publication is the memoir Getting Lost, translated by Alison L. Strayer, retired this month.

Olsson went connected to accidental that, “Annie Ernaux manifestly believes successful the liberating unit of writing. Her work is uncompromising and written successful plain language, scraped clean. And erstwhile she with large courageousness and objective acuity reveals the agony of the acquisition of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to spot who you are, she has achieved thing admirable and enduring.”

The committee cited Ernaux’s Happening arsenic a masterpiece and it feels peculiarly applicable to today’s times arsenic it details the young narrator’s amerciable abortion. Olsson was asked during the property league by a subordinate of the property from Nordic Chinese Times if the prime of Ernaux during this clip was a “message [they] wished to deliver.” Olsson replied, We ore connected lit and literate prime and we don’t person immoderate much connection to present to the satellite but it’s besides precise important to america that the laureate has cosmopolitan effect successful her work, that it tin scope everyone. And successful that respect, I deliberation the connection is that this is lit for everyone.”

In caller years, the Swedish Academy has been nationalist successful its desires to determination the grant distant from its existent “Euro-centric” and “male-dominated” approach. The Nobel Prize successful Literature has present been awarded to 17 women since 1901, with 8 of those awards successful the 21st century, astir precocious American writer Louise Glück successful 2020, Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk successful 2018 though she was fixed the grant successful 2019, and Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich successful 2015. While an betterment implicit the erstwhile century, antheral writers are inactive much apt to triumph the award.

The grant has continued to beryllium dominated by European writers. At Thursday’s property conference, Olsson was asked by a subordinate of the Associated Press astir the imaginable disappointment from immoderate parts of the satellite that the committee had chosen different European laureate. In response, helium offered that the committee has “many antithetic criteria and you cannot fulfill each of them. We tin lone beryllium definite that we strive for literate quality. Every twelvemonth you person to fulfill that criteria. Last twelvemonth we gave the prize to a non-European writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah, this twelvemonth we springiness the prize to a woman. . . We effort to broaden the scope of the Nobel Prize but our absorption indispensable beryllium literate prime archetypal of all.”

You tin larn much astir erstwhile winners successful our archives:

Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah Wins 2022 Nobel Prize successful Literature

Poet Louise Glück Wins 2020 Nobel Prize successful Literature

2018 and 2019 Nobel Prize Literature Winners Announced