Annie Ernaux: "Nobody believes me but I didn't want the prize"

- It was the event that made me write my very first text.

Today you would call it rape, but I didn't experience it that way.

I simply experienced it as male brutality, says Annie Ernaux.

It would take almost 60 years before Annie Ernaux managed to turn the traumatic event into literature in the book "A Girl's Memoirs".

By then she had long been an internationally recognized writer who renewed autobiographical writing and introduced new perspectives into French literature.

About necessity

She had written about her parents' lives, the shame of the class trip and an illegal abortion.

With her short and matter-of-fact style, Annie Ernaux has created literature from the parts of her life as literature from what she found difficult to talk about.  

- With writing, you can express what cannot be said.

By going deeper into the unspeakable, one can succeed in finding the causes.

It's not about courage.

For me it is necessary, says Annie Ernaux.

"Has writing prevented me from living?"

Annie Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy.

She had a simple childhood where she was nevertheless encouraged to take the class trip that her parents did not have the opportunity for.

In the book "The Years", which is a kind of collective autobiography where the zeitgeist itself is at the center, she describes a life where the poverty of the Second World War turns into modernity and liberation.

In the programme, she reflects on what it does to life when large parts of it become literature.

- Has writing prevented me from living?

It's a question that has become more and more burning over time.

The choices I have made in life have been guided by my writing, says Annie Ernaux.

- I have a feeling that my life does not belong to me.

That I have placed it entirely in my books.

It's probably wrong.

But that's what I think, she says.

In SVT's Nobel portrait of Annie Ernaux, the author also says that she longs for the commotion surrounding her Nobel prize to subside, that it will end after her visit to Stockholm.

She also expresses that she would have preferred not to receive the award.

- No one believes me when I say it, but it's true, she says.