The Swedish Academy valued that the work of the French writer, Annie Ernaux, has the «courage to discover the entrails of life from personal memory».
Annie Ernaux is an 82-year-old French author who became the 17th woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy stressed that Ernaux’s literature «is autobiographical»; and that, with a flat and simple writing, describes «life as it is».
Ernaux’s work reflects on poverty and aspirations for social advancement. Also, of a rejection confessed to her parents, when she saw herself becoming a bourgeois. She had an abortion in 1963 and wrote about it in her novel «The Event» (2000).
«Intransigent» was another of the words used by the Academy to describe Ernaux’s work. An adjective present in his novel «La mujer helada» (1981), where the demands of marriage are opposed to the aspiration for an intellectual career.
Annie Ernaux’s parents were small businessmen in Yvetot, a French commune near the small canton called Lillebone, where Annie was born in 1940, in northern France, in the Normandy region. They lived from a «coffee shop and a grocery store,» according to a BBC report . For a time, in her childhood, she thought she was an only child, until she found out that her older sister, the firstborn, had died. According to Ernaux, her sister «died so that she could be born.» He said it in his novel «The Other Daughter» (2014).
For an introductory tour of the author’s work, we recommend the following article published in «The New Yorker».