Annie Ernaux

2022 - 10 - 7

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Image courtesy of "NPR"

French writer Annie Ernaux wins the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature (NPR)

Erneaux is known for her semi-autobiographical works. The permanent secretary noted her "clinical acuity" in examining personal memory.

According to the book's press release, it's a "meditation on the phenomenon of the big-box super store." "For the reader, the images of the past reveal themselves in broken shapes and forms with holes all over," Sadegh writes. In 2020, her book A Girl's Story was translated into English. First published in 2008, The Years was an expansive look at the society that created her. Ernaux was born in 1940 in France. [the committee noted](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2022/ernaux/facts/) the "clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory."

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Nobel Prize in literature awarded to Annie Ernaux (The Washington Post)

The Swedish Academy said that it had awarded Ernaux the prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and ...

A 2018 translation of her memoir [“The Years”](https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/embed?asin=B07D56SBCM&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_QY22B5XHQTY55NZPVW8P&tag=thewaspos09-20) was [shortlisted](https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-years) for the Booker Prize. [Abdulrazak Gurnah](https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/23/nobel-winner-abdulrazak-gurnah-afterlives/?itid=lk_inline_manual_23), a Tanzanian-born novelist who writes primarily in English. [“I Remain in Darkness,”](https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/embed?asin=B07WMZSLLQ&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_5HE0SET8XRBERH26GJWY&tag=thewaspos09-20) Ernaux chronicled her mother’s decline under the effect of Alzheimer’s. In response to an audience question at this year’s announcement about the Nobel Prize’s general focus on European writers, Olsson said, “We have many different criteria, and you cannot satisfy all of them.” Stressing again that literary quality was most important to the committee, he went on, “One year, we gave the prize to a non-European writer, last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah. [kept secret for 50 years](https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/literature/), can be submitted by members of the academy and its peer institutions, literature and linguistics professors, previous laureates, and the presidents of national literary societies. Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot directed “The Super 8 Years,” a 60-minute film composed of old home movies that she is to present at the New York Film Festival next week. [born](https://www.annie-ernaux.org/biography/) in 1940 in Normandy, the daughter of working-class parents. After reviewing and discussing the works of the nominees on that list, the academy selects a winner in October. Instead, at her best, Ernaux has the ability to refine ordinary experience, stripping it of irrelevancy and digression and reducing it to a kind of iconography of the late-20th-century soul.” John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said in a statement: “As a great admirer of Annie Ernaux’s extraordinary work, it is a particular pleasure for me to see her receive this global recognition. A translation of Ernaux’s [“Getting Lost,”](https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B09N6S2QHP&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_A7EN738616G6GHRK0TV2&tag=thewaspos09-20) a diary of her affair with a younger, married man, was published this year. [“Happening”](https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/embed?asin=B00541ZWVC&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_VRREX561XQ6ZFG25X6ZD&tag=thewaspos09-20) discusses an illegal abortion that she had in the 1960s.

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French writer Annie Ernaux awarded Nobel Prize in literature (Hope Standard)

STOCKHOLM (AP) — French author Annie Ernaux, who has fearlessly mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, won this year's Nobel ...

Her most critically acclaimed book is “The Years,” published in 2008, which described herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal](https://apnews.com/article/science-health-stockholm-chemistry-fd3521c6436c94fd6dd73f4e53d86d09) for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895. Ernaux is the first female French Nobel literature winner and just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes. Last year’s prize winner, Tanzanian-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.” Her first book was “Cleaned Out” in 1974. “She writes about things that no one else writes about, for instance her abortion, her jealousy, her experiences as an abandoned lover and so forth. “And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking. While Macron praised Ernaux for her Nobel, she has been unsparing with him.

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Annie Ernaux: the 2022 Nobel literature laureate's greatest works (The Guardian)

Writer and critic Catherine Taylor explains how the French writer became the 'great chronicler to a generation' • Annie Ernaux wins the 2022 Nobel prize in ...

Margaret Drabble has commented that “Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation” – now the great chronicler been justly rewarded with the greatest of literature prizes. (She would go on to teach in schools and university, from 1977-2000, alongside writing books.) A Man’s Place is very much part of what Ernaux calls the “lived dimension of history” – it is dispassionate about the life of a working-class man of his time, a struggling grocer with minimal education: “no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony,” she warns us. Nowhere is uncompromising style more apparent than in Ernaux’s account of the illegal abortion she had in 1963 as a student in Rouen. Her work as a whole is reflective, intimate – but also impersonal and detached. [shortlisted for the International Booker prize](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/09/man-booker-international-shortlist-dominated-by-women-authors-and-translators-olga-tokarczuk-annie-ernaux), that Ernaux has made a big impact on the anglophone world. The October announcement frequently has journalists and editors frantically Googling that year’s recipient – and perhaps a decade ago, Annie Ernaux might have received the same treatment.

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French author Annie Ernaux awarded 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature (ABC News)

French writer Annie Ernaux has been named as the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize to be announced on Friday, and the economics ...

She has achieved something admirable and enduring," the Nobel Prize's Twitter account said after the announcement. Each of the prize carries a cash award of 10 million Swedish krona ($1.42 million) and will be presented to winners on December 10. The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm and comes with a cash award of 10 million Swedish krona ($1.42 million).

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Annie Ernaux given Nobel literature prize (PerthNow)

French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, ...

In explaining its choice, the Academy said Ernaux "consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class". The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($A1.4 million). French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory", the award-giving body says.

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French author Annie Ernaux wins Nobel literature prize (Financial Times)

Writer, 82, is best known for works exploring female sexuality and the lives of women.

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French feminist author Annie Ernaux wins Nobel Prize for Literature (SBS)

Annie Ernaux is the first French woman to win the literature prize. She says winning the award has only given her a greater drive to "continue the fight ...

"The Peace Prize laureates represent civil society in their home countries. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, the Center. Mr Bialiatski was released from that prison sentence in 2014, 18 months early. They have for many years promoted the right to criticise power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens," the committee said in its citation. But in July 2021, Mr Lukashenko's crackdown came to his doorstep with coordinated raids on a wide range of civil society groups, including Viasna's offices and Mr Bialiatski's home, in a sweep that the group called a "new wave" of repression. Jailed Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, Russian organisation Memorial and Ukrainian group Center for Civil Liberties won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, highlighting the significance of civil society for peace and democracy.

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Annie Ernaux wins the 2022 Nobel prize in literature (The Guardian)

The French author of mostly autobiographical work takes the prestigious books prize for the 'courage and clinical acuity' of her writing.

Previous winners include Bob Dylan, cited for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, and Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. Testard said Ernaux’s “literary project has been to write about her life and to get at the truth of it somehow … “Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean,” he continued. Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy. Reading her is to thoroughly purge yourself of the notion that shame could be a possible outcome of wanting sex.” Ernaux is the first French writer to win the Nobel since Patrick Modiano in 2014.

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In honoring Annie Ernaux, the literature Nobel Prize gets it exactly right (Los Angeles Times)

Yes, awarding the Nobel Prize in literature to Ernaux, a chronicler of illegal abortion, is a political move. But it's also a victory for literature.

“I shall never hear the sound of her voice again,” she writes in the closing paragraph of “A Woman’s Story.” “It was her voice, together with her words, her hands, and her way of moving and laughing which linked the woman I am to the child I once was. In “The Years” (2008), Ernaux addresses the issue head on, seeking out “a language no one knows.” The solution she enacts explodes our preconceptions of voice and person, sliding between the singular and plural, using pronouns such as “we” and “she” while eschewing the memoir’s defining posture: “I.” One of the ways Ernaux develops this book is to circle back, more than once, to the opening sentence, using it as a kind of echo that punctuates the narrative. Both “A Woman’s Story” and its companion volume “A Man’s Place” (1983) represent cases in point. Such a move highlights not only the immediacy of writing as an act but also the emotions Ernaux can’t resolve. “It was only the day before yesterday that I overcame the fear of writing ‘My mother died’ on a blank sheet of paper, not as the first line of a letter but as the opening of a book.” [As I once wrote](https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-annie-ernaux-20180118-story.html) in these pages, Ernaux is ruthless, which is the highest praise I have to give. In more than 20 books, 15 of which have been translated into English, she has [effectively deconstructed](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-21-et-secondulin21-story.html) not just the memoir as a form but also the very question of memory and identity. At the same time, and as much as I support that intention, the choice of Ernaux as this year’s laureate is a victory for literature. She is not interested in taking narrative at face value or using it to blur or soften; there is not a sentimental sentence in her oeuvre. “Trace it all back,” she writes in “Cleaned Out,” “call it all up, fit it all together, an assembly line, one thing after another. I use the word reminiscence rather than memoir for a reason; Ernaux also resists the simplification of form.

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Annie Ernaux: 'Uncompromising' French writer wins Nobel Literature ... (BBC News)

French writer Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the panel said was an "uncompromising" 40-year body of work exploring "a life ...

It was turned into a film that For this purpose she uses language as “a knife”, as she calls it, to tear apart the veils of imagination. [wrote in 2020](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/a-memoirist-who-mistrusts-her-own-memories) that over her 20 books, "she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life". That would later feed into her novels. [#NobelPrize]laureate in literature Annie Ernaux has said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes for social inequality. Her parents ran a café and grocery shop, and when she encountered girls from middle-class backgrounds, she experienced the "shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time,"

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French writer Annie Ernaux awarded Nobel Prize in literature (Minute Mirror)

Ernaux started out writing autobiographical novels, but quickly abandoned fiction in favor of memoirs. Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee ...

Unlike in previous books, in “The Years,” Ernaux writes about herself in the third person, calling her character “she” rather than “I”. The prizes to Gurnah in 2021 and U.S. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally.” Her 2000 novel “Happening,” depicts the consequences of illegal abortion. The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” She is the first French literature laureate since Patrick Modiano in 2014. Ernaux describes her style as “flat writing” – aiming for an very objective view of the events she is describing, unshaped by florid description or overwhelming emotions. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents.

Writing about love, sex, abortion and class, French author Annie ... (Women's Agenda)

French author, Annie Ernaux has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, often writing about daily life in France for women.

Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.” She described the experience of finding out she’d won the Prize as being “in the desert and there is a call that is coming from the sky.” In 1974, her debut novel Les armoires vides was published and then translated to English as Cleaned Out in 1990. This book has become a contemporary classic in France alongside another of her works, “A Woman’s Story.” She’s been praised for centering the voice of women’s freedoms in her writing about love, sex, abortion, shame and class divisions. Her path to authorship was long and arduous.”

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2022 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Annie Ernaux (The Saturday Paper)

French author Annie Ernaux uses her life as the source of her complex, distilled body of prose.

Ernaux chose to avoid the first person “je”, to use “nous” and “on”, translated as “we” and “they”, as well as the recurring figure of a woman invoked in the third person. “As she repeatedly writes in A Girl’s Story, the real of ‘then’ is still vibrantly alive in the present – that is, in the ‘now’ of writing). The reader is involved in the ‘recherche’ and the excavating.” In essence, she says, it was a book about passion, and the objective signs of what it was to experience. “I love the simultaneous endeavour to tell the story of ‘what happened’ and at the same time seeking the means of telling the story as precisely as possible in relation to memory, sensation, the living truth of it,” she says. In other words, the author’s search for those ways of telling is an integral part of the narrative, and the adventure (of reading, of translating). Finally, in A Girl’s Story (Mémoire de fille), published in 2016, she found a way to put this material at the centre of a book, and to examine remembering and writing the past. It was the subject of the first manuscript she completed. The journal, she says, “is that which is experienced in the present; Simple Passion is about the past”. Ernaux’s mother, who died in 1986, was the subject of the next book, A Woman’s Story (Une femme). Instead, she resolves, as she explains in the book, to “collate my father’s words, tastes and mannerisms, the main events of his life, all the external evidence of his existence, an existence which I too shared”. Her latest work to be published in English is Getting Lost (Se Perdre), the unedited, uncut journal of a time in the late 1980s when she was involved in an intense, consuming sexual relationship with a Russian diplomat based in Paris.

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Nobel prize in literature: Annie Ernaux and writing from experience (The Conversation UK)

The French writer has won the Nobel for literature for her ascetic approach to writing and fearlessness in covering the personal and taboo.

[The Years](https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-years), is considered to be her magnum opus. Her courage in exploring and exploding generic expectations is also reflected in the content of her work. Her protagonist is a woman who, like so many of Ernaux’s readers, identifies as a “ [class defector](https://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Folio/Folio/L-ecriture-comme-un-couteau)”. [familiarity, a subtle complicity](https://www.persee.fr/doc/polix_0295-2319_1991_num_4_14_1454)” as her teachers avidly listened to the stories of her middle-class schoolmates but silenced her attempts to speak about her home life. [I Remain in Darkness](https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/i-remain-in-darkness) was written during her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. Ernaux believes that writing about the self inevitably involves writing about a socio-political context, and thereby extends the representativeness of her own experience. She is the only daughter of working-class parents who ran a cafe-cum-grocers, and her childhood was underpinned by class tensions within the family home and outside it. This experience gave Ernaux knowledge of French theories and practices of writing, which is evident in her references to authors such as Honore de Balzac, Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir and her self-reflexive comments on the act of writing. Of the 119 awarded, Ernaux is only the 18th woman Nobel laureate in literature and the first French woman to have won the prize. It was at school that she became aware of a “ She then studied literature at Rouen university and went on to teach it at secondary school before becoming a full-time writer in the 1970s. She has continued to surprise and inspire readers with coverage of daring topics and her innovative approach to genres.

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The Moving Clarity of Annie Ernaux (Vogue.com)

The French author's Nobel Prize win represents a great moment for memoir, for women, and for the precise use of language in the service of emotional truth.

The first in her family to receive an advanced education, she worked for years as a teacher of literature, eventually becoming part of the French national correspondence school CNED. Born in 1940, she grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, the daughter of a farm boy and a factory worker who both left school at 12 and who came far enough up in the world to run a provincial café and general store. She is the author of more than 20 books, most of them relatively brief accounts drawn from her memories of a life—which doesn’t immediately strike one as the stuff of literature, but that’s where Ernaux, once again, proves us wrong.

The Guardian view on Annie Ernaux: a vintage Nobel winner (The Guardian)

Editorial: One of France's finest writers has joined an all too select bunch of female laureates. And about time too.

Though it would be unwise to overclaim the significance of her win, it suggests that the notion of “an ideal direction” may just be shifting. The rubric of the Nobel prize calls for “outstanding work in an ideal direction”. [Olga Tokarczuk](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/20/olga-tokarczuk-interview-flights-man-booker-international). Her work is part of a European tradition of autofiction that has since produced Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård and her young compatriot Édouard Louis. Far from being a writer of the me-me-me school, her gift to literature has been to find the collective in the particular. Her unstinting recreations of her own experience, from working-class origins, have faced down many of the big taboos, from sexual desire and illegal abortion to cancer and dementia.

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The Year I Tore Through Annie Ernaux's Books (The Atlantic)

Reading the work of the newly minted Nobel Prize laureate, one novelist discovered the kind of writer she wanted to be.

something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded, and can help us understand—endure—events that occur and the things that we do?” Her faith in writing inspires me; she sends me back to work. The result of this intimacy is that each of us who reads her feels that she is “ours,” that our relationship to her is unique. It is this, perhaps, that is most radical about her work, and about the Nobel committee’s decision to honor her. There is an intimacy to Ernaux’s work, created in part from the rawness of her details—her openness about sex, about the illness and death of her parents, about her own abjectness in affairs with middling men—and also from the way that she reveals her process to the reader as she writes. She recounts events and she interrogates the act of recounting, so that her books are always as much about writing as they are about the story being told. Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize yesterday at 82, is a writer unparalleled, at least within the limits of my knowledge, in her frankness, her willingness to lay herself bare, to let the seams show in her excavations of the past.

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Annie Ernaux writes about deep pain with cool restraint (The Washington Post)

The French author, who was awarded this year's Nobel Prize for literature on Thursday, writes about subjects that often go unrecorded or unexamined: her ...

Eat, drink, and make love.” Or, as she puts it in “Happening”: “These things happened to me so that I might recount them. Writing served as “a kind of morality for me,” she writes in “Getting Lost.” “I forgave my husband’s pleasure seeking because he didn’t write. It is an act of reading in which nothing is restored, but something is gained. Revisiting the camp where she was demonized socially — after a lifetime of success as a writer, after writing about and forcing herself to look at what happened with “H” — doesn’t free her. Never in her work do you find the glittery sense of narcissism or self-enthrallment so common in personal writing; rather, the cool restraint is directed compulsively at something else, at trying to understand, or link, or otherwise simply describe, what others might try to explain. It induced in her a need to be seen that led to sexual promiscuity; the book is uncomfortable to read for the ways it frankly acknowledges how challenging it is for the author to write it. In particular, I thought often of a line that Ernaux wrote in her novel “A Simple Passion,” about an older woman’s affair with a younger married man: “I do not wish to explain my passion — that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify — I just want to describe it.” While Ernaux writes explicitly and vividly about herself, she does so as “an ethnologist of myself,” as she has put it. Her mother called her “beast” and “slut” as easily as “poppet,” and wanted more for her daughter while simultaneously resenting her: “Look at everything you’ve got, and you’re still not happy!” In “Happening,” she describes an illegal abortion she underwent in the 1960s in France. [awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on Thursday](https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/06/annie-ernaux-nobel-prize-literature-2022/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4), was born in 1940 in Normandy and grew up in the town of Yvetot, where her parents ran a grocery store and cafe in a working-class area. Ernaux’s novels and memoirs are slim but flashingly deep; they possess the shocking pain of a paper cut.

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