The Nobel Prize committee has announced that French author Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022. Regarding the author, the Twitter handle of the Nobel Prize said, “Annie Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class. She has written over thirty literary works.”

Ernaux, according to the Nobel Prize committee, believes that writing is a political act. Thus, she chooses to use language as a “knife” in order to “to tear apart the veils of imagination.”

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The Nobel Prize also cites the 2002 work by Ernaux, L’occupation, and says that in the book she “dissects the social mythology of romantic love”. Further adding that in the book “she both confesses and attacks a self-image built on stereotypes. Writing becomes a sharp weapon dissecting truth.”

Ernaux grew up in a working-class family in Normandy’s Yvetot. She has studied at the Rouen and Bordeaux universities and also worked on an unfinished thesis on the French author and playwright, Pierre de Marivaux.

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The official website of the Nobel Prize cites books like journal du dehors (1993; Exteriors, 1996) or La vie extérieure 1993–1999 (2000; Things Seen, 2010) by Ernaux in order to explain her style of writing. She uses a “‘raw’ type of prose in the form of a diary” where only external events are recorded. This can be classified as a “methodic reconstruction of the past”. The website states that the 82-year-old author uses this style in order to “rip apart the veil of fiction”.

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Ernaux published her first book, Les armoires vides, in 1974. But it was her fourth publication, La place (1983), that gave a hint of the style that would end up fetching her a Nobel Prize around 40 years later. This book was a 100-page account of her father and the social milieu he had grown up in.