STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 has been awarded to Annie Ernaux, the French writer who has spent five decades turning her own life — a working-class childhood, an abortion when it was illegal, marriage, divorce, illness — into some of the most rigorous prose in the language.
The Swedish Academy cited the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. Ernaux, 82, is the seventeenth woman to win the literature prize and the first Frenchwoman to do so.
Her method is singular: books of fifty or a hundred pages, written in a flat, almost sociological style she has described as an attempt to write as if no one were watching. “The Years”, her collective memoir of French life from 1940 to the 2000s, is widely considered her masterpiece; “Happening”, about her 1963 abortion, has found new readers as abortion rights have come under pressure from the United States to Poland.
The choice is politically resonant in France, where Ernaux has become an icon of the left — a supporter of the gilets jaunes and, this year, of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s alliance. She has never separated the writing from the politics: to write about her mother’s shop, she has said, was to avenge her class.
Her Nobel arrives as autofiction dominates literary fashion worldwide. The Academy, in effect, has gone to the source: the woman who made the examination of an ordinary life into high art, and never apologised for the subject matter being herself.
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