The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded Thursday to French novelist Annie Ernaux for her work and her treatment of “memory”, announced the Swedish Academy. The 82-year-old writer is rewarded for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory”, explained the Nobel jury. She becomes the 17th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the 16th French winner since the founding of the famous awards in 1901. Through an essentially autobiographical work, Annie Ernaux has produced a remarkable radiography of the intimacy of a woman who has evolved according to the upheavals of French society since the post-war period. This professor of literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise has written about twenty stories in which she dissects the weight of class domination and love passion, two themes that have marked her itinerary of a woman torn apart by her popular origins. These include Les armoires vides (1974), La Place (1983) or Les Années (2008) or more recently Mémoire de fille (2018). “In her work, she constantly explores the experience of a life marked by great disparities in terms of gender, language and class”, underlined the academician Anders Olsson. His clinical style, devoid of any lyricism, is the subject of numerous theses. Her novels Passion simple and L’Événement have both been adapted to the cinema in 2020 and 2021.Annie Ernaux hailed “a very great honor” but also “a great responsibility” given to her in order to testify for the “correctness and Justice”. “I consider it a very great honor that I am being given and, for me, at the same time a great responsibility, a responsibility that is given to me by giving me the Nobel Prize”, reacted the laureate to the Swedish television SVT. “That is to say, to testify […] of a form of fairness, of justice, in relation to the world”, she added.
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