The French writer Annie Ernaux wins the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature for “the courage and clinical acuity through which she has revealed the roots, the estrangements and the collective bonds of personal memory”.
Born in Lillebonne (Seine-Maritime) on 1 September 1940, Ernaux is one of the most authoritative voices on the French cultural scene. Studied and published all over the world, her work was consecrated by the publisher Gallimard, who collected her main writings in a single volume in the prestigious Quarto series. This time you the Swedish Academy you have awarded a name also known in Italy, given the numerous translations that the publishing house “L’Orma” has given to Italian readers over the years.
Ernaux – born in Lillebonne in 1940 in France – made her debut in literature in 1974 with The empty cupboards, autobiographical novel. Later, in 1984, he obtained the prestigious Prix Renaudot with the work I like it. Yearspublished in 2008, a fresco that goes from the great war to today, is rewarded between 2008 and 2009 with various prizes.
In 2011 he publishes The other girl, destined for his sister, who passed away before birth; also comes out theblack workshop, which groups together some notebooks of annotations, notes, plans relating to the editing of his works. The same year an anthology entitled write life comes out for the “Quarto” editions: it contains about thirty autobiographical interventions and offers a notebook of about one hundred pages, consisting of photos and extracts from his unpublished intimate diary. girl memory, an autobiographical story in which, after sixty years, she returns to her 18 years, in the summer of 1958, when she has her first sexual adventures in a summer colony of the Orne: an experience that will remain for her “the great memory of shame, more meticulous, more intractable than others. This memory is in sum the special gift of shame ”.
In 2017 he received the Marguerite Yourcenair award for his work as a whole.Her novels are disseminated and translated in various countries around the world, especially in English-speaking ones. Furthermore, from The Event a film was made in 2021 under the direction of Audrey Diwan. Annie Ernaux’s production is strongly marked by a sociological examination that seeks to rediscover “the legacy of a collective memory in an individual memory”.