French author Annie Ernaux wins 2022 Nobel Prize for literature

French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature.

“The 2022 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory,” the Nobel committee said.

Ernaux, 82, becomes only the 17th female writer to have won the prize, widely considered the most prestigious award in world literature since it was formed in 1901.

Ernaux’s books include her debut, “Cleaned Out,” a bracing account of her working-class youth, including the abortion, carried out when the procedure was still illegal in France, and “A Simple Passion,” a best seller in France about Ernaux’s affair with a married foreign diplomat.

Ernaux’s autobiographical novels defy “the demands of her genre — the desire for melodramatic intimate revelation and the smoothness of fictional tale-telling,” Claire Messud wrote in The Times in 1998. The books instead “offer a searing authenticity and reveal the slipperiness of much that we call memoir.”

The New York Times reported that Ernaux first tried writing in college, but her book was rejected by publishers as “too ambitious,” she told The Times in 2020. She didn’t take up writing again until her 30s, when she was a married mother of two, working as a French teacher.

She wrote “Cleaned Out” in secret. “My husband had made fun of me after my first manuscript,” Ernaux said. “I pretended to work on a Ph.D. thesis to have time alone.” After the book was published, her husband reacted badly again. “He told me: If you’re capable of writing a book in secret, then you’re capable of cheating on me,” Ernaux said. Soon, she was writing about her unhappy marriage.

The New York Times said the prize, which is given for a writer’s entire body of work, is regarded as the foremost prize in world literature, with past winners having included Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, and even Bob Dylan. It comes with an award of 10 million Swedish krona, or about $911,000.