The Nobel Foundation on Thursday announced that French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022.
In the press release, the foundation said the award is “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
In her writing, Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class. Her path to authorship was long and arduous.
A masterpiece from her production is the clinically restrained narrative about a 23-year-old narrator’s illegal abortion, L’événement (2000; Happening, 2001). It is a first-person narrative, and the distance to the historical self is not stressed as in many other works.
