Noble Prize in Literature

Facts for Prelims

Noble Prize in Literature

News: French author Annie Ernaux won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature for blending fiction and autobiography in books that fearlessly reveal her experiences as a working-class woman to explore life in France since the 1940s.

About:
•    Ernaux, née Duchesne, was born in Lillebonne Normandy in 1940.
•    She worked as a schoolteacher, and devoted herself to writing once she retired.
•    More than 20 of her books have been school texts in France for decades.
•    According to the jury, she was honored “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

Her work:
•    “Cleaned Out”, was her first publication in 1974.
•    She gained popularity in English speaking world in 2019, after her seminal work ‘The Years’. It later got shortlisted for the Man Booker international prize.
•    Her book on her illegal abortion in the 1960s, ‘Happening’ (first published in 2001) has been in the limelight after abortion rights were curtailed in the US. 
•    Her ‘A Girl’s Story’ (published in French in 2016), built on her own experiences at a children’s camp, deals with the shaming an 18-year-old girl is subjected to for her sexuality.
•    ‘Getting Lost’ (2022), which talks of her affair with a Russian diplomat - she was divorced, he was married is a rare clear-eyed account of female desire.