Annie Ernaux wins 2022 Nobel Prize in literature

Stockholm, Oct 06: Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to French author Annie Ernaux "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory."

Annie Ernaux believes in the liberating force of writing. Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.

"With great courage and clinical acuity, Annie Ernaux 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," the Nobel Committee said in a tweet.

Annie Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy, where her parents had a combined grocery store and café.

Annie Ernaux's debut was Les armoires vides (1974; Cleaned Out, 1990), and already in this work she started her investigation of her Norman background, but it was her fourth book, La place (1983; A Man's Place, 1992), that delivered her literary breakthrough.