Who Is Annie Ernaux ? A Nobel Prize Winner For Literature

The Swedish Academy announced on Thursday Nobel 2022 for literature and this year's winner is Annie Ernaux of France. The Nobel prize in literature is awarded to Ernaux for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory, as press release stated.

Nobel prize In Literature Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux is an autobiographical writer and professor of literature. She is most acclaimed author of France, who writes novels about daily life in France as well as non-fiction and is one of her country’s most acclaimed authors. The 82-year-old work in literature is closely linked with sociology.

Ernaux notable work includes Simple Passion, A Woman's Story, and A Man's Place. The French Laureate started her career in 1974 with Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out), again an autobiographical novel.

Initially, she started with fiction but turned to autobiography. Most of her work is combination of history and real-life experiences of people.

Few of her book includes,  her parents' social progression (La place, La honte), her teenage years (Ce qu'ils disent ou rien), her marriage (La femme gelée), her passionate affair with an eastern European man (Passion simple), her abortion (L'événement), Alzheimer's disease (Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit), the death of her mother (Une femme), and breast cancer (L'usage de la photo).

La Place (A Man's Place) won her the Renaudot Prize in 1984. The New York Times Notable Books recognized her book Woman's Story, A Man's Place, and Simple Passion and A Woman's Story was also a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Few other books like Shame  named her Best Book of 1998, I Remain in Darkness a Top Memoir of 1999 by The Washington Post, and The Possession was listed as a Top Ten Book of 2008 by More Magazine.

Ernaux was also nominated for the International Booker Prize for her book, The Years, in the year 2019. As a writer who has always written about the very fabric of the society we live in, she has covered diverse angles examining gender and class.

Ernaux is born into working-class family, with her parents owning a café-grocery store in Yvetot in Normandy.

The Nobel laureate studied at the universities of Rouen and then Bordeaux, qualifying as a school-teacher, and gaining a higher degree in modern literature (1971).

Ernaux  taught at Bonneville Lycée in 1970s, and other few institutes like college of Évire in Annecy-le-Vieux, and Pontoise. Later she joined the National Center for Distance Learning (Centre national d'enseignement à distance - CNED).

Most of her books are translated in the English and available for reading. To know more about the laureate, can visit her profile here.

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