French author Annie Ernaux, whose novels are based on personal experience of class and gender, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The jury praised “the courage and clinical acuity with which she reveals the roots, alienations and collective limitations of personal memory”.
Ernaux is the author of 22 novels. Informed of the award, the 82-year-old told Swedish television on Thursday that she felt honored and under a huge responsibility.
Annie Ernaux began her career with “Les Armoires Vides” (The Empty Cupboards) in 1974. Based on the family conflict between a heroine whose education exposes the intellectual limits of her bar-nurturing parents, it is an unrelentingly grim version of Ernaux’s own early childhood. life.
Born Annie Duchesne on September 1, 1940 in the town of Lillebonne in Normandy, northwestern France, Annie Ernaux eschewed a career behind the counter at the family bar/grocery store and graduated from the University of Rouen.
She was haunted by a sense of guilt and shame for what she believed to have been a betrayal of her parents and their way of life. Two books, “La place” about her father, and “Une femme”, based on her mother’s indomitable courage, can be seen as attempts at redemption.
Annie Ernaux went on to pass summation, the toughest exam for French teachers. She taught in several high schools before joining the National Center for Distance Education.
Working class heroine
In his parallel career as a writer, Ernaux was a trailblazer for a whole generation of French writers from working-class and immigrant backgrounds.
Virginie Despentes of the “Vernon Subutex” trilogy has credited her as a key influence. Edouard Louis, whose first novel, “En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule,” about growing up gay and poor in northern France, was translated into more than 20 languages, said he had been “deeply moved by the power and beauty” of Ernaux’s work.
Ernaux has no time for stylistic pretension, and despises what she calls “the beautiful phrase”. However, she has been described as “a kind of French working-class Marcel Proust”.
She opened up previously taboo subjects for public debate. Her novel “L’Evenement” is a fictional retelling of her own experience of unwanted pregnancy and abortion on the back, before France decriminalized the medical termination of pregnancy in 1975.
Annie Ernaux has been regarded by many as a feminist role model, not least for her personal stance on abortion and her career as a single mother of two boys after her divorce in 1984.
Ernaux has also been a supporter of the #MeToo movement, which took longer to get off the ground in France than elsewhere, where actress Catherine Deneuve initially defended male “stupidity”.
“I was so ashamed of Deneuve,” Ernaux said, describing the actress’ comments as “the reflection of a group of privileged women”.
“In France, we hear so much about our seduction culture, but it’s not seduction, it’s male dominance.”
International recognition comes late
Outside of France, recognition for her work has only developed in recent years, especially after the English translation of her 2008 masterpiece, The Years, which was nominated for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.
The novel opens with the certainty that “All pictures will disappear,” and ends with the author’s fervent hope that she can “save something of the time that will disappear when we are no longer here.”
There have been 17 female winners among the 119 Nobel Prize winners in literature.
Nobel season continues on Friday with the much-anticipated Peace Prize, the only Nobel prize to be announced from the Norwegian capital of Oslo.
Source: sn.dk