Woman’s experiences in life result in Nobel for literature
PARIS — French author Annie Ernaux won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for blending fiction and autobiography in books that fearlessly mine her experiences as a working-class woman to explore life in France since the 1940s.
In more than 20 books published over five decades, Ernaux has probed deeply personal experiences and feelings — love, sex, abortion, shame — within a society split by gender and class divisions.
After a half-century of defending feminist ideals, Ernaux said “it doesn’t seem to me that women have become equal in freedom, in power,” and she strongly defended women’s rights to abortion and contraception
“I will fight to my last breath so that women can choose to be a mother, or not to be. It’s a fundamental right,” she said in Paris. Ernaux’s first book, “Cleaned Out,” was about her own illegal abortion before it was legalized in
France.
The prize-giving Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity” of books rooted in her small-town background in the Normandy region of northwest France.
Dan Simon, Ernaux’s longtime American publisher at Seven Stories Press, said that in the early years, “she insisted that we not categorize her books at all. She did not allow us to refer to them as fiction and she did not allow us to refer to them as nonfiction.”
Ultimately, he said, Ernaux has created “a genre of fiction in which nothing is made up.”
Ernaux worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book was “Les Armoires Vides” in 1974 (published in English as “Cleaned Out”). Two more autobiographical novels followed — “Ce Qu’ils Disent ou Rien” (“What They Say Goes”) and “La femme Gelee” (“The Frozen Woman”) — before she moved to more overtly autobiographical books.
In the book that made her name, “La Place” (“A Man’s
Place”), published in 1983 and about her relationship with her father, she wrote: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally.”
“La Honte” (“Shame”), published in 1997, explored a childhood trauma, while “L’Evenement” (“Happening”), from 2000, dealt like “Cleaned Out” with an illegal abortion.
Her most critically acclaimed book is “Les Annees” (“The Years”), published in 2008. Described by Olsson as “the first collective autobiography,” it depicted Ernaux herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century.
Ernaux’s “Memoire de Fille” (“A Girl’s Story”), from 2016, follows a young woman’s coming of age in the 1950s, while “Passion Simple” (“Simple Passion”) and “Se Perdre” (“Getting Lost”) chart Ernaux’s intense affair with a Russian diplomat.
Ernaux is the first Frenchwoman to win the literature prize, and just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates.