STOCKHOLM: French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender, was on Thursday awarded the Nobel Literature Prize.
Ernaux, 82, was honoured “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”, the jury said.
The feminist icon told reporters in Paris the award created a responsibility to “continue the fight against injustice”. She said literature could not have an “immediate impact”, but she nonetheless felt the need to maintain the struggle for the rights of “women and the oppressed”.
Her more than 20 books, many of which have been school texts in France for decades, offer one of the most subtle, insightful windows into the social life of modern France.
Ernaux is the second woman among the eight Nobel laureates honoured so far this year, with women vastly under-represented in the history of the prizes.
French President Emmanuel Macron hailed the award, calling Ernaux’s voice “that of the freedom of women and of the forgotten”.
Personal experiences are the source for all Ernaux’s work and she is the pioneer of France’s “autofiction” genre, which gives narrative form to real-life experience.
Above all, her crystalline prose has excavated her own passage from working-class girl to the literary elite, casting a critical eye on social structures and her own complicated emotions.
“Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class,” the Swedish Academy noted.
“Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean,” it said.“And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.”
The chairman of the Nobel Committee, Anders Olsson, told AFP the Academy was taken with her “frankness”.
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