French author Ernaux wins Nobel Prize for Literature
French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experiences of class and gender, has been announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature.
Ernaux was honoured “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”, the jury at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm said.
Interviewed on Swedish television immediately after the announcement, Ernaux, 82, called it a “very great honour” and “a great responsibility”.
Her more than 20 books, many of which have been school texts in France for decades, offer one of the most subtle, insightful windows into the social life of modern France.
The prize carries a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000), which will be handed out on December 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
One clear contender for the literature prize this year was Salman Rushdie, the India-born writer and free-speech advocate who spent years in hiding after Iran’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called for his death over his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses.
