• Annie Ernaux, known for her autobiographical novels Les Années or L'Evénement, received the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.

  • The French writer hailed "a very great honor" but also "a great responsibility" given to her in order to testify for "fairness and justice".

  • She is the first French woman out of sixteen French laureates to receive this prize in the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

When Annie Ernaux writes about her life, she tells it in an impersonal style that gives her story a collective strength and her style a universal value.

If you have read

The Years

(2008) his most famous book on his childhood and youth, or seen at the cinema recently

The event

(2000), according to the story of the clandestine abortion which was hers, but also that of thousands of women in France in the 1960s, you will understand why the Nobel Prize for Literature ended up crowning this 82-year-old French writer. for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory”, as the jury explained this Thursday in Stockholm.

“Great honor and great responsibility”

Joined by Swedish public television, the winner hailed “a very great honor” but also “a great responsibility” given to her to continue to bear witness to “a form of fairness, justice, in relation to the world”.

With her crystalline prose, Annie Ernaux had long been expected to win the prize, but without ever being a favorite.

So much so that she assured that it was a big “surprise” for her.

For the bookmakers too, facing Michel Houellebecq or the Canadian Anne Carson, placed at the top of the forecasts this Thursday morning.

Not to mention the more “political” candidates, such as the author of the

Satanic Verses

threatened with death Salman Rushdie or the Russian dissident exiled in Berlin Ludmila Oulitskaïa.

A simple work, but without concession

But no, it was Annie Ernaux who won, the first French woman out of 16 laureates, and with her "an uncompromising work written in simple, clean language", underlined Academician Anders Olsson in his presentation of the winner.

“When Annie Ernaux brings to light, with courage and clinical acuity, the contradictions of social experience, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or the inability to see who one is, she accomplishes something admirable and long-lasting," he added.

The work of this professor of literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise includes some twenty stories in which she dissects the weight of class domination and amorous passion, drawing from her own life to tell the intimacy of a woman and her evolution according to the upheavals of French society since the post-war period.

Among the most notable:

Empty cabinets

(1974),

La Place

(1982),

L'Événement

(2000),

Les Années

(2008) and more recently

Mémoire de filles

(2018) or

Le Jeune Homme

(2022), all published by Gallimard.

Culture

Nobel: Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux wins the prize "for her courage" according to the Academy

Movie theater

"We must dissociate legal abortion and clandestine abortion", insists the director Audrey Diwan

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