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.
More than a dozen French writers have captured the literature prize, though Ernaux is the first French woman to win, and just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates.
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 at a news conference 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. Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said Ernaux is “not afraid to confront the hard truths.”
Ernaux’s books present uncompromising portraits of life’s most intimate moments, including sexual encounters, illness and the deaths of her parents. Olsson said Ernaux’s work was often “written in plain language, scraped clean.” He said she had used the term “an ethnologist of herself” rather than a writer of fiction.
French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “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.”
