French author Annie Ernaux has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”
The prize comes along with 10MM Swedish Krona (approx. $900,000 USD), and is to be awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction,” according to Alfred Nobel’s will.
Ernaux is a novelist and author of non-fiction books. She is one of the most critically acclaimed authors, and was one of the favourites to win, according to The Guardian. She is the sixteenth author from her country to win the Nobel Prize, and the first since 2014.
She was born in 1940 and spent her childhood in the Normandy town of Yvetot. After studying at Rouen University, she worked as a secondary school teacher. She taught at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance from 1977 to 2000.
Her first book, Les armoires vides, was published in France in 1974 and translated into English in 1990 as Cleaned Out. Her literary breakthrough came from her fourth book, La place (translated into English as A Man’s Place).
She has won the French award Prix Renaudot in 2008 for The Years – her autobiography. The book was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been around since 1901. Its past winners include Kazuo Ishiguro, Bob Dylan, Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, William Golding, Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Pearl S. Buck, and many more. For a full list of past winners and for a description of their accomplishments, please see their website.