Paris, Europe Brief News – French author Annie Ernaux has been announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature.
Ernaux was honoured “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”, the jury at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm said.
Annie Ernaux is known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender.
Her more than 20 books, many of which have been school texts in France for decades, offer one of the most subtle, insightful windows into the social life of modern France.
This year’s #NobelPrize laureate in literature Annie Ernaux has said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes for social inequality. For this purpose she uses language as “a knife”, as she calls it, to tear apart the veils of imagination. pic.twitter.com/TQm6rxjvMp
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2022
The prize carries a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000).
The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
One clear contender for the literature prize this year was Salman Rushdie, the India-born writer and free-speech advocate who spent years in hiding after Iran’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called for his death over his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses.
Ernaux is the first French woman to win the literature prize. She told reporters the award created a responsibility to “continue the fight against injustice”.
She further said literature could not have an “immediate impact”. But she nonetheless felt the need to maintain the struggle for the rights of “women and the oppressed”.
