Dylan, Munro, Ernaux… The Literature Nobels of the last decade – Libération

2023-10-05 10:21:15

While waiting for the announcement of the 2023 Nobel Prize winner, here is the list of winners of the last ten years.

If the Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Physics and Chemistry reward scientists for a discovery or work in a specific field of research, the Nobel Prize in Literature honors a writer for his or her entire body of work. The style of the author has often been a criterion in the choice of Swedish Academicians, but the freedom of the subject conveyed by the work is important.

Here is the list of the last ten winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, before the announcement of the 2023 prize in Stockholm on Thursday.

In 2022, it was the Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux who was rewarded for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory”.

In 2021, the choice fell on the English writer Abdulrazak Gurnah for “his empathetic and uncompromising account of the effects of colonialism, and the fate of refugees caught between cultures and continents”.

The American Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel in 2020 “for her characteristic poetic voice, which with its austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

In 2019, Austrian author Peter Handke won the award “for his influential work which, with its linguistic ingenuity, explored the periphery and singularity of human experience”.

In 2018, the Polish Olga Tokarczuk was rewarded “for a narrative imagination which, with encyclopedic passion, symbolizes the crossing of borders as a form of life”.

It was the Englishman Kazuo Ishiguro who won the Nobel in 2017, for having “revealed, in novels of powerful emotional force, the abyss beneath our illusory feeling of comfort in the world”.

A landmark Nobel, the one awarded to the American songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016 “for having created new modes of poetic expression within the framework of the great tradition of American music”.

In 2015, Belarusian Svetlana Alexievitch was rewarded “for her polyphonic work, a memorial to suffering and courage in our time”.

IN 2014, the Academicians’ choice fell on the Frenchman Patrick Modiano “for the art of memory with which he evoked the most elusive human destinies and revealed the world of the Occupation.”

The Canadian Alice Munro received the literary grail in 2013, considered “sovereign of the art of the contemporary short story”.

In 2012, it was the Chinese author Mo Yan “who, with hallucinatory realism, unites tales, history and the contemporary” who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.