French author Annie Ernaux awarded Nobel Prize in Literature 2022; a look at her life and career
French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year 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.
French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year 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. (Image: News18 Creative)
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Ernaux was born in Lillebonne, Normandy and spent her growing-up years in nearby Yvetot. She studied at the universities of Rouen and then Bordeaux, qualified as a school-teacher, and earned a higher degree in modern literature in 1971. (Image: News18 Creative)
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In 1974 Annie published her first book, “Les armoires vides”. (Image: News18 Creative)
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Since 1980s, she focused on memoirs, wrote about her ill-fated marriage, her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s, her own experience of cancer, as well as several passionate affairs she enjoyed in middle age. (Image: News18 Creative)
In 2008 she won the Prix Renaudot for her autobiography “The Years” and in 2014, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cergy-Pontoise. (Image: News18 Creative)
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In 2022, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. (Image: News18 Creative)
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Annie Ernaux started her literary career in 1974 with Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out), an autobiographical novel. A look at all the books written by the Nobel Prize winning author. (Image: News18 Creative)
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Early in her career, she turned from fiction to focus on autobiography. Her work combines historic and individual experiences. (Image: News18 Creative)
Ernaux is the 16th French writer, and the first Frenchwoman, to receive a prize in literature. (Image: News18 Creative)
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“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people,” from Annie Ernaux’s ‘Happening’. (Image: News18 Creative)
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“I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday,” from Ernaux’s ‘A Girl’s Story’. (Image: News18 Creative)
