French author Annie Ernaux wins Nobel literature prize

Annie Ernaux, the French author known for her exploration of female sexuality and the lives of women, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ernaux, 82, was given the 2022 award “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”, the Nobel committee said on Thursday.

Anders Olsson, the committee’s chair, said that “her oeuvre consistently explores the experience of a life marked by great disparities regarding gender, language and class”.

Born in Normandy in 1940, Ernaux has written 23 books, with her work translated into 36 languages. She has frequently drawn on her own experiences in her writing, and is now considered one of the pioneers of autofiction, a term used to describe autobiographical novels.

French president Emmanuel Macron saluted the author’s entry into “French literature‘s great circle of Nobel” winners. “Annie Ernaux has been writing, for 50 years, the novel of our country’s collective and intimate memory,” he tweeted. “Her voice is that of women’s freedom and the century’s forgotten.”

Ernaux’s career began with the publication of Les armoires vides (Cleaned Out), which drew on her abortion at the age of 23. In 1984 she received the Renaudot prize, France’s most prestigious award after the Goncourt, for La place (A Man’s Place), a portrait of her father.

The book marked her choice to embrace a minimalist style, which she labelled “écriture plate” or flat writing. This literary approach underpinned her goal to remain as objective as possible in investigating her past as she drew on memories as well diaries and old photographs — a method described as “auto-socio-biography” by sociologist Isabelle Charpentier.

Les années (The Years), an autobiographical saga spanning six decades that mixes personal details, historical facts and sociological observations, was shortlisted for the International Man Booker prize in 2019.

One of her most recent books, Mémoire de fille (A Girl’s Story), recalled her sexual experiences in the summer of 1958. Le jeune homme (The Young Man), which recounts her affair with a man 30 years her junior, was published this year in France.

Ernaux is regarded as a towering figure in French literature, inspiring a generation of female authors who have found encouragement in her success as a woman. She has also influenced other French writers such as Edouard Louis who, like her, is driven by his working class upbringing and status of class “defector”.

Her books are now regarded as classics but for years she faced strong criticism in French literary circles for being too crude in her depictions of some of her most intimate and traumatic experiences — attracting epithets such as “Madame Ovary”.

She saw sexism in some of the reactions. “In France, literature is a man’s world. All the prizes, everything is controlled by men. Now people say I have legitimacy, but I’ve had to wait to be over 50,” she said in a 2020 interview.