Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022

In October 2022 the French author Annie Ernaux became the first French woman (the seventeenth woman) to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Read together, the reflections of the Nobel women reveal a diversity of ideas about what literature can do and a sense of a practitioner’s responsibility to these ideas. While the lectures vary widely in content—from Lessing’s and Gordimer’s concrete political lessons to Szymborska’s larger abstract musings to fables personal (Müller) and universal (Morrison)—each contains observations that are at once totally complex and completely true. – extract from LitHub article by Jessi Haley

The Agony and Experience of Class

The Nobel Committee recognised that ‘in her writing, Annie Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class. 

They awarded her the prize:

“for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”

In this slim volume is the acceptance speech given by Annie Ernaux on 7 December, 2022 in Stockholm, Sweden, alongside a short biography (both translated by Alison L.Strayer). There is a brief banquet speech included, translated by Sophie Lewis.

It is a brilliant introduction to the motivation of the lifetime of work and writing by Annie Ernaux, opening with a reference to the title – alluding to the challenge of a search for the perfect opening line to her upcoming Nobel Prize lecture:

Finding the sentence that will give me the freedom and the firmness to speak without trembling in this place to which you have invited me this evening.

She doesn’t have to look far, she says, although the line she refers to – the title of her talk – is one she wrote in a diary sixty years ago.

j’écrirai pour venger ma race

It was written when she was 22 years old, the daughter of working class parents, studying literature in a faculty of sons and daughters of the local bourgeoise; an echo of Arthur Rimbaud’s cry in Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell):

‘I am of an inferior race for all eternity.’

A young woman, the first of her family to be university educated, her youthful idealism was projected into those words.

I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of land-less labourers, factory workers and shop keepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth.

Turning Away From Convention

Her first attempt at the novel was rejected by multiple publishers, but it was not this that subdued her desire and pride, to eventually seek a new form of expression.

It was life situations in which the weight of difference between a woman’s existence and that of a man was keenly felt in a society where roles were defined by gender, where contraception was prohibited and termination of pregnancy a crime.

These situations and circumstances instilled in her a pressing need to move away from the “illusory ‘writing about nothing’ of my twenties, to shine light on how her people lived, and to understand the reasons that had caused such distance from her origins.

Like an immigrant now speaking a language not their own, a class-defector, she too had to find her own language, however, it was not to found in the pages of the esteemed writers she had been studying and was teaching:

I had to break with ‘writing well’ and beautiful sentences – the very kind I taught my students to write – to root out, display and understand the rift running through me. What came to me spontaneously was the clamour of a language which conveyed anger and derision, even crudeness; a language of excess, insurgent, often used by the humiliated and offended as their only response to the memory of others’ contempt, of shame and shame at feeling shame.

Recognising that when a reader was culturally privileged they would maintain the same imposing and condescending outlook on a character in a book, as they would in real life, she sought to elude that kind of gaze and thus her trademark style evolved:

I adopted a neutral, objective kind of writing, ‘flat’ in the sense that it contained neither metaphors nor signs of emotion. The violence was no longer displayed; it came from the facts themselves and not the writing. Finding the words that contain both reality and the sensation provided by reality would become, and remain to this day, my ongoing concern in writing, no matter what the subject.

It’s an enrapturing lecture and an excellent introduction and insight into Ernaux’s particular and individual style, and wonderful that her volume of work has been recognised and celebrated at this esteemed level. You can read the lecture using the link below.

I have read one book by Ernaux, A Man’s Place and I am planning to read Shame, A Simple Passion and her masterpiece The Years.

Have you read any books by Annie Ernaux? Are you planning to read any?

Further Reading

The Nobel Prize Website: Annie Ernaux Nobel Lecture (Read the lecture here)

LitHub Article: A Brief History of All the Women Who Have Won the Nobel Prize in Literature by Jessi Haley

Annie Ernaux, French Author

Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux (née Duchesne) was born in Lillebonne and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery store in the spinning mill district.

They had lost a little girl of seven before I was born. My first memories are inseparable from the war, the bombings that devastated Normandy in 1944.

She was educated at a private Catholic secondary school, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time.

After abrief stint in Finchley, London, cleaning houses all morning and reading from the library all afternoon, she returned to France to study at the University of Rouen. Obtaining a degree in modern literature, she became a school teacher. From 1977 to 2000 she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance.

Her books, in particular A Man’s Place (La Place) and A Woman’s Story (Une femme) have become contemporary classics in France. These books marked a break from the definitive novelistic form, she would continue teaching in order to never depend on commercial success.

One of France’s most respected authors, she has won multiple awards for her books, including the Prix Renaudot (2008) for The Years (Les Années) and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize (2017) for her entire body of work. The English translation of The Years (2019) was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International and won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (2019).

The main themes threaded through her work over more than four decades are: the body and sexuality; intimate relationships; social inequality and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to write these life experiences.

Fitzcarrraldo Editions have now translated and published eleven of her works into English, including this booklet.

Ernaux’s work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring. – Nobel Prize Committee