Nobel literature prize 2022 awarded to French author Annie Ernaux
The Nobel prize in literature for the year 2022 was awarded to Annie Ernaux on Thursday at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
Annie Ernaux has been given the award “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”, the Nobel prize committee said.
On restraints of personal memory, forging new ones and estrangements, Annie Ernaux’s prose has been able to capture it all without verbosity. Her engagement with daily life in France through her work is diligent, looking at social disparities like gender, language and class neither through rose-tinted glasses, nor through abject derision but through a dignified, almost anonymous distance.
In 2021, Tanzanian-born UK based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work focuses on the impact of migration, had won the Nobel prize “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
In 2020, the award was given to US poet Louise Gluck. The Nobel literature prize was postponed in 2018 as sex abuse allegations naming the Nobel literature committee rocked the Swedish Academy.
The Nobel prize announcements kicked off on Monday with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine for his work on the Neanderthal DNA. Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger jointly won the physics prize on Tuesday for their immense contribution to quantum physics. In chemistry, the Nobel prize was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, K. Barry Sharpless, and Morten Meldal on Wednesday for developing click chemistry.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday while the economics award on Monday.