Annie Ernaux wins the Nobel Prize for Literature: "I don't give myself the freedom to invent"

The French writer Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday for her "unyielding" work of a "liberating force", according to the Swedish Academy that awards the award, which highlighted how her "simple language" serves to describe "the agony of the class experience, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy, and the inability to see who you are.”

“It is a direct, naked and, as far as possible, totally honest search for what can be called a truth,” summed up author Ellen Mattson, a member of the jury.

For Ernaux, writing is the most important political act, and for this reason her relentless work flees from the ornamental with a recurring feeling of being a "turncoat" from her social class.

"It is something that is at the heart of all my work", this author, one of the great figures of French literature, was born in Lillebonne in 1940 and whose culture allowed her to "leap" from the working-class environment to The bourgeoisie.

Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. Cati Cladera / EFE

The Swedish Academy awarded Ernaux "for the courage and clinical acumen with which he uncovers the collective roots, alignments and limitations of personal memory," according to the ruling.

His award was received as a classic choice, compared to other more risky ones like last year, when the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded for his work on post-colonialism.

"It is a well-known name throughout the literary world and has been translated into many different languages," Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature, told a news conference.

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Ernaux grew up in a middle class family but of proletarian origin.

The daughter of merchants, she spent her childhood and adolescence in the Norman town of Yvetot, until she moved to Rouen to pursue university studies in Literature.

He devoted himself to teaching, first at a Bonneville institute, before beginning to publish his works.

In various interviews, the author recalls that she lived a "long" and "arduous" path in her literary career, in which she consistently and from various angles examines a life marked by "great disparities" in terms of gender, language and class.

More than a fiction author, Ernaux has defined herself as "an ethnologist of herself", with influences ranging from Marcel Proust to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the

or the sociologist Pierre Bordieu.

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the feminist struggle

His literary debut came in 1974 with

, but success came with his fourth work,

(1987)

would be dedicated to his mother years later .

"Her writing is always overshadowed by a feeling of betrayal against the social class from which she comes", highlights the ruling of the award to an author for whom writing is a political act and who defends the choice of the fair phrase rather than beautiful.

The event

(2000), about illegal abortion and winner two decades later of the Golden Lion of Venice for its film adaptation, is another of his outstanding works, as well as

(2002), about romantic love.

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Y

(2008) gave it an international reputation thanks to its status as a "collective autobiography" in which personal and common memory converge.

Throughout her life, Ernaux has experienced a feeling of betrayal, of being a turncoat from the humble class in which she was born and she has reflected this in her books, works set in the Normandy in which she was born and grew up in the bosom of a working family far from the pleasures of the most bourgeois classes.

For the author, her dedication to writing and politics have been her only form of reconciliation.

"Living between two waters drives you to write. You just have to look around me, it is clear that it is a bourgeois environment, but I cannot recognize myself among those who were born in that class," she confessed in 2019.

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Her literature reflects her committed feminism, convinced that there is still a "mental burden" on what has traditionally been the role of women.

For Ernaux, the struggle of feminism has to continue: "The children, the house, the family..., we women still carry a home computer in our heads" while it is the men who "hold the reins, the economic power , what is the march of the world", a distribution of roles that is assumed in the Western world, has criticized on occasion.

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For the new winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, writing is linked to total independence, starting with the material, with her firm conviction of not owing anything to anyone.

In her way of writing, she explains, she has never written "to make it pretty or to make a beautiful sentence: What I choose is the right sentence", affirms this writer, who has been saying for more than 40 years that one must speak of women's literature, just as there is no men's literature.

Despite this, she remembers how some of her books were received with "condescension" as happened with

, which was said to be a "book of women", or with the "total silence" that there was around her work

, where she recounted her clandestine abortion.

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Her literature also revolves around memory, as shown in

, a work in which, through photos and memories left by events, words and things, Annie Ernaux describes the passage of time, from the postwar period to today, a form of impersonal and collective autobiography.

Often written in the third person, her autobiographical accounts are, as she describes, "an analysis of memory."

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"Saying that memory is wrong is a common belief. Memory is based on something that has taken place, even if the details are not. For me, using memory is diving into something, while imagining is emerging. No I give myself the freedom to invent," he says.

That memory was recently turned into a documentary assembled with archive footage of his family life in the 1970s.

From all this was born his rejection of fiction, which he attributes to the fact that the novel is the dominant genre and with an indisputable position in the literary world, something that seems to him "the projection in literature of the domination of the so-called superior classes", as he explained when collecting the Formentor Award in 2019.

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And for this reason, his literature has always tried to replace "the lightness of the terms of communication that happily transmit social and sexual domination with the weight of words weighed down by people's real lives", something that, for Ernaux, means implicitly granting writing a power of intervention in the world.

Beyond his literary facet, Ernaux has publicly shown his political commitment, supporting the neo-communist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2012 presidential elections.

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And in 2018 she was one of the signatories of a petition by cultural personalities to boycott the France-Israel cultural season, due to the Israeli policy against the Palestinian people.

The influence of European authors

With Ernaux there are seventeen women who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in a list of 119 authors.

Of these, eight have received it in the 21st century: Elfriede Jelinek (2004), Doris Lessing (2007), Herta Müller (2009), Alice Munro (2013), Svetlana Alexievich (2015), Olga Tokarczuk (2018) and Louise Glück. (2020), apart from this year's winner.

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The choice of Ernaux confirms the clear predominance of European and North American literature in the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature (more than 80% of the total) and allows French literature to come second, with 15 winners, far behind literature in English (31) and ahead of German (14) and Spanish (11).

"We can't satisfy everyone. We try to broaden the scope of the prize. Last year we gave it to a non-European author, this one to a woman. But our focus must be, first and foremost, on literary quality," Olsson said.

Like the rest of the Nobel prizes, the Literature prize is endowed this year with 10 million Swedish crowns (916,000 euros or 882,000 dollars).

With information from EFE and