The author is the first French, the sixteenth French writer, eight years after Patrick Modiano, and the seventeenth woman to receive the distinction.
by
At his work table, in his house in Cergy-Pontoise (Val-d’Oise), Annie Ernaux was surprised a little on Thursday, October 6, that her phone rings with hard. Not to the point of winning before having finished what she had in class, however. It is therefore with a slight discrepancy that the writer learned from the Swedish press agency TT that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2022. “I am very surprised, you are sure that I Did you have received? “Asked the one who had been among the favorites for online Paris sites for several days – as had already been the case in 2021. Sure and certain! With this reward, the Committee of the Swedish Academy wanted to greet (in its tarabiscotted language which offers a renewed enchantment each year) “the courage and the clinical acuity with which it discovers the roots, the distance and the collective constraints of the Personal memory “.
Annie Ernaux is the first French author to receive, since 1901, the distinction with 8 million crowns (around 730,000 euros), the sixteenth French writer, eight years after Patrick Modiano, and the seventeenth woman. She succeeds Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah.
What is thus seen worldwide is a work that does not practice autobiography (term that it rejects, however) that to say a story, sensations, common emotions. Who writes “I” so that the reader, in turn, reads “I” and finds himself, whatever the details of his own life, in the text he has in front of him. A work admirable by its consistency, its sharpness and its intensity, whose writing has always been conceived by its author as a requirement “which cannot leave in rest”, focusing sentence after sentence, book after book, to try to ‘Gradually elucidating the real, to access the understanding and the expression of an otherwise inaccessible truth about existence. This is the fundamental power that Annie Ernaux attributes to this exercise located, according to that which has always agreed to generously comment on its work during interviews, “between literature, sociology and history”.
“Political act”
Empty cabinets (Gallimard, 1974) to the young man (Gallimard, 2022), passing by the place, the Event, the Memory of the Girl (Gallimard, 1983, 2000, 2016) or even looks at the Enlightenment, my love (Seuil, 2014), the writer has greatly contributed to developing French literature, and beyond, as the Nobel Prize attests.
You have 85.54% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.