French writer Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize for Literature 2022, this Thursday (06). Ernaux is the author of “Os Anos”, from 2008 (Portuguese version by Fósforo Editora, from 2021), her best-known work, and of other literary titles over 46 years of writing, deeply linked to her life, despite the writer refuse the term “autobiography”.
At 82, Ernaux prefers the genre she created, “autosociobiography”: a mix of personal stories with social criticism. According to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, the prize was awarded “for the courage and clinical acuity with which it uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective constraints of personal memory.”
In the book “O Lugar”, for example, she gives an emotional account after her father’s death, telling the family’s trajectory linked to the post-war French historical moment. Ernaux notes that her parents’ struggle for her to study and have a better life resulted in a sentimental estrangement between them, caused by the country’s intellectual and economic structure.
Ernaux classifies writing as a requirement “that cannot relax”. French journalist Raphaëlle Leyris of Le Monde describes Ernaux’s text as an “effort sentence after sentence, book after book, to try to elucidate reality, gain access to understanding and express a truth about existence”.
The writer often uses themes considered unworthy of literature, such as abortion, public transport, supermarkets and others, in addition to dealing with more “noble” subjects, such as time, memory and oblivion.
Born in Yvetot, a small town in Normandy, in 1940, Annie Ernaux is the sixteenth Frenchwoman to receive the award. And out of a hundred men, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to seventeen women since 1901. The first of these was Selma Lagerlöf in 1909 and the last this year to Annie Ernaux.
This time, the amount received by the winners of all categories is 10 million Swedish kronor (in the current direct conversion, around R$ 4.8 million).
The writer is one of the guests for Flip, the International Literary Fair of Paraty, this year. Annie is expected to attend one of the tables on November 26th.
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