French writer Annie Ernaux wins 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature

Eighty-Two-year-old French writer Annie Ernaux has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for the year 2022. The Swedish Academy has awarded the Nobel to the octogenarian french author for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. Her literary work maintains close links with sociology.

Last year the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Tanzanian-born British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.

Annie Ernaux is a pioneer of autofiction, a style of writing that combines two mutually inconsistent narrative forms, namely autobiography and fiction. The events in her book, she says, belong to everyone, to history, to sociology. In her works, the past is a raw material of her writings, which is transformed by rooting it



in the present.

 

Ernaux says “necessity, not pleasure” takes her back to her past, which she dissects like a forensics expert examining a crime scene. Her magnum opus, Les années (The Years) has been written in the vein of a memoir and explodes with perspective and voice. The book has been written using “one” and “we” and occasionally “she” or “they”, but never “I” The Happening, recounting her experience as a university student in France in 1963, is an intense account of an illegal abortion.

The novel was also adapted into an award winning French drama thriller film in 2021 by the same name. In Simple Passion, Ernaux touches on her sexuality through a fictionalised account of a tumultuous affair with an Eastern European businessman. She attributes her view of her life as a woman to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and acknowledges the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre.