It is Annie Ernaux who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded this Thursday by a Swedish Academy that was announced to be more unpredictable than ever.
And the surprise was great, both Michel Houellebecq and the Canadian Anne Carson were the favorites to succeed the British novelist of Tanzanian origin Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021) and the American poet Louise Glück (2020).
An academy that defies predictions
It was also thought that the Academy could reward the British author of "Satanic Verses", Salman Rushdie, victim of an attempted murder in August.
Or the Russian author exiled in Berlin Ludmila Oulitskaïa, a declared opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who would have been another very political choice in the context of the war in Ukraine, the Finnish Sofi Oksanen or the Ukrainian Andrei Kurkov also being able to wear this signal.
After #MeToo
The Swedish Academy is recovering from a long crisis, after a #MeToo scandal in 2018 and the awarding of a controversial Nobel the following year to the Austrian writer Peter Handke with sulphurous pro-Milosevic positions.
Renowned - and criticized - for her masculine and Eurocentric choices, she has since successively crowned an American and an author born in Zanzibar whose work is centered on the torments of exile and refugees, anti-colonialism and anti-racialism.
The Nobel jury regularly insists on the fact that its prize is neither political nor subject to the rules of parity or ethnic diversity, and that the only guarantee is the quality of the letters and the work.
But "the Academy is now obviously concerned about its image with regard to diversity and gender representation in a completely different way than before the scandal of 2017-2018", explained Wednesday to AFP Björn Wiman, chief of the cultural department of the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.
"I think we want a better known name this year because of the surprise last year," he predicted.
He was right.
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