In the last two years, the Swedish Academy announced two rather surprising winners. This time the Nobel Prize for Literature goes to an author who was a favorite of many.
French writer Annie Ernaux has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. This was announced by the Swedish Academy on Thursday in Stockholm. The 82-year-old received the award “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, alienations and collective limitations of personal memory,” said the Academy’s permanent secretary, Mats Malm, at the announcement.
According to the academy, Ernaux believes in the liberating power of writing. You write uncompromisingly and in clear, clean language. With great courage and clinical acuity she reveals the torment of the class experience and describes, among other things, shame, humiliation and jealousy. “We haven’t been able to get Annie Ernaux on the phone yet,” Malm noted in the announcement. She only found out about the award shortly afterwards through a call from the Swedish news agency TT, as the agency reported. “No! Really?” She said according to TT. “I was working this morning and the phone rang all the time, but I didn’t answer it,” she said, adding, “I hear it ringing all the time now.”
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Literature went to the previously relatively unknown Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah. He was honored “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the ramifications of colonialism and the plight of the fugitive across the divide between cultures and continents”. The year before, the American poet Louise Glück had received the Nobel Prize – she was not considered one of the many favorites beforehand.
Quite different now Ernaux: Before the award was announced, the Frenchwoman was counted among the narrow circle of favorites by several literary experts. The German literary critic Denis Scheck had her on the list as his big favorite. It was a “celebration day for literature,” he said on Thursday. From an aesthetic as well as a political point of view, this year’s decision is “a happy choice”. The Nobel Prize in Literature is considered the most prestigious literary award in the world. There were 233 candidates on the so-called long list for the award this year – which names are among them is kept top secret every year.
After the announcement of the award winner Annie Ernaux, her German publisher expects a rush for her books. All volumes are currently available, according to Suhrkamp-Verlag. New editions are planned for all Ernaux books published by the publishing house. In addition, a new German translation of an Ernaux volume will be published these days. In “The Other Girl”, Ernaux writes a letter to her sister, whom she never got to know. It’s about childhood and how strokes of fate can change a family forever. The paperback also includes “The Event”, the story of a pregnant young woman who tries to find a way to have an abortion in France in the 1960s