Annie Ernaux was in the kitchen listening to the one o’clock news. She turned on the radio because she wanted to know who won the 2022 Nobel Prize. She was particularly interested about Literature category. And it was actually she who was being mentioned as the latest laureate. She confessed her initial feeling to Claire Paetku, correspondent of the Nobel Prize’s Outreach: “like... you are in the desert and there is a call that is coming from the sky.”
Fourteen laureates were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2022, for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. Their work and discoveries range from paleogenomics and click chemistry to documenting war crimes.
This year, Nobel Prizes seem to love France, and France loves Nobel Prizes. In the wake of the Nobel Prize in Physics granted on October 4 to French researcher Alain Aspect, Annie Ernaux received her Nobel Prize in Literature, an especially honourable prize for France, on October 6. Annie Ernaux is the first French woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to a writer who “in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction” France can boast counting with 16 laureates of Nobel Prizes in Literature, leader of most awarded countries.
Annie Ernaux was awarded the Prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory, declared the Nobel communication committee when awarding the prize. This prize recompenses all her work, which is mostly autobiographical, and her work turned her in a prominent French feminist figure.
Great honour
When contacted by the media in the wake of the announcement, Ernaux expressed “great honour” for her prize, but also a “great responsibility” that is now hers to continue to show “some sort of justness, justice, with the world”.
Annie Ernaux, who was among others a teacher in literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, wrote about 20 novels as what she calls “impersonal biography”.
And this original form of literature inspired French President Macron, who saluted her achievement on Twitter by saying “for 50 years, Annie Ernaux has written the novel of the collective and intimate memory of our country. Her voice is the voice of the freedom of women and forgotten figures of the century”. The tweet of the French Ministry of Culture felt the same emotion, when she talked about the “crowning of an intimate work that carries the life of others” and shows a “delicate and dense writing that revolutionised literature”.
Ernaux grew up in Yvetot in Normandy. She is from a working-class background. Her parents eventually owned a café-grocery store. She studied at the universities of Rouen and then Bordeaux, qualifying as a school-teacher, and gaining a higher degree in modern literature (1971). She started her literary career in 1974 with Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out”), an autobiographical novel. Very early in her career, she turned away from fiction to focus on autobiography, combining historic and individual experiences.
Her books are followed by a wide readership, and are reviewed in most local and national newspapers in France, as well as being the subject of many radio and television interviews and programs, and a large and growing international academic literature. Her famous works include La Place (“A Man’s Place”, 1983), L’événement (“Happening”, 2000), L’Occupation (“The Possession”, 2002), and Les Années (“The Years”, 2008).
Message to the young
Asked what would be her message for young writers, especially for those who are writing in their native language, she said:
“I think that when we write, what is really important is that we need to read a lot. Sometimes young people say, ‘Oh no, I don’t read... I write!’ Well, no. That’s not possible. You need to read a lot. And the second message I would give them is not to strive to write well, but rather to write honestly. It’s not the same thing.”
Despite her being unsparing with President Emmanuel Macron, pouring scorn on his background in banking and said his first term as president failed to advance the cause of French women, the politician continued congratulating her for her literary achievement, saying through Twitter: “Annie Ernaux has been writing for 50 years the novel of the collective and intimate memory of our country. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.”
Reading Ernaux
Prof. Ruth Cruickshank, who specialises in contemporary French fiction at Royal Holloway, University of London, said: “When a woman wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is always great news. Thirteen dead and two living white French men (Le Clézio and Modiano) have been Nobel laureates since 1901. Ernaux explores memories of life experiences – both extraordinary and relatable – a backstreet abortion; failed affairs whether with a lover in Russia or a man 30 years younger; the death of her parents; breast cancer.” American novelist Brandon Taylor joked about Ernaux’s win, saying: “Cinema is back. Annie Ernaux is a Nobel laureate. Perhaps modernity is saved.”
At a public press conference, she told journalists the following statement regarding her responsibility with the prize:
“The Nobel Prize, it hasn’t sunk in yet, but it’s true I feel I have a new responsibility. This responsibility is about carrying on the fight against injustice, whatever it is. I use the term ‘injustice’ but it has different levels. Everything that is a form of injustice towards women, towards those I call the dominated ones. I can tell you I will fight until my last breath so that women be able to choose to become mothers or to choose not to.
It’s a fundamental right. Contraception and the right to abortion are the core of women’s freedom because it is a societal choice, it is a political choice and that’s why in some countries, in some regions of the United States, in some states they’re aware of this and that’s why they want to maintain the centuries-old domination of women.”
French author Édouard Louis welcomed Ernaux’s win, saying: “She didn’t try to fit into existing definitions of literature, of what is beautiful: she came up with her own.” He is often compared to her and referred to as her successor due to the similarities of their backgrounds and literary styles.
“No one writes in the same way after reading Annie Ernaux,” he said. Another admirer was philosopher Didier Eribon, who expressed: “I have such admiration for her, not just as a writer, but for her activism. She always found a way to capture in one sentence what I couldn’t say in a page.” Eribon first met Ernaux in 2002, shortly after the death of Pierre Bourdieu, a leading French sociologist and globalisation critic, becoming close acquaintances thereafter.
Rushdie unforgotten
Following the attack on the British author Salman Rushdie on August 12, 2022, as he was about to give a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, U.S., numerous academic institutions and societies started calling the attention of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee to bestow him this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Among the authors calling to recognise Rushdie were French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, French Minister of Culture Françoise Nyssen, British writers Ian McEwan and Neil Gaiman, Indian writers Kavery Nambisan and Adil Jussawalla, and Canadian author Margaret Atwood who declared, “If we don’t defend free speech, we live in tyranny: Salman Rushdie shows us that.” American journalist David Remnick explains why Rushdie deserves the Nobel Prize:
“As a literary artist, Rushdie is richly deserving of the Nobel, and the case is only augmented by his role as an uncompromising defender of freedom and a symbol of resiliency. No such gesture could reverse the wave of illiberalism that has engulfed so much of the world. But, after all its bewildering choices, the Swedish Academy has the opportunity, by answering the ugliness of a state-issued death sentence with the dignity of its highest award, to rebuke all the clerics, autocrats, and demagogues—including our own—who would galvanise their followers at the expense of human liberty. Freedom of expression, as Rushdie’s ordeal reminds us, has never come free, but the prize is worth the price.”
Rushdie, known for his controversial 1988 novel The Satanic Verses which earned him a fatwā from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini, has annually been included in the Ladbrokes odds. Journalist Jeff Simon of The Buffalo News expressed the possibility of Rushdie winning the prestigious prize, saying:
“A Nobel for Rushdie wouldn’t only be a glorious message from our civilisation to all who would decry “the free word”; it would, in effect, be a way of redeeming, in its hour of need, the Nobel Prize for Literature itself. And now just imagine what it might possibly mean this October if they decided, after all, to give the Nobel to him, who currently lives and works in America but is civilisation’s very symbol of how much courage is often required of the written word in this world.”
It was not until 27 years later when the Swedish Academy, which had been neutral regarding the Rushdie affairs, condemned the Iranian death warrant against the British author. Prior to the condemnation, two of the Academy’s members, Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten, stopped participating in the Academy’s work in protest at its refusal to make an appeal to the Swedish cabinet in support for Rushdie.
The Nobel Prize in Literature tends to be considered as the most prestigious and coveted prize. Annie Ernaux now joins 16 prestigious French predecessors who received the prize before her. They include major French writers who became true leading figures of international literature of the 20th century:
- Romain Rolland (Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915),
- Roger Martin du Gard (1937),
- André Gide (1947),
- François Mauriac (1952),
- Albert Camus (1957),
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1964)
- Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (2008),
- Patrick Modiano (2014).