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Nytimes books2/28/2023 She tried writing in college, but publishers rejected her book as “too ambitious,” she told The New York Times in 2020. Her father was violent and abusive, and when she was 12, she saw him try to kill her mother, an event she writes about with shocking directness in “Shame”: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon,” the first line reads. She wants to speak in a general way through the particular.”Įrnaux was born in 1940 and grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Yvetot, a small town in Normandy where her parents had a grocery store and cafe. “For the literary establishment, a working class woman from the north of France is not supposed to do that, and yet she makes herself a very powerful stand-in. “When she started out, it was very challenging to the establishment, the way she put herself and her life at the center of large questions about social change in France,” said the novelist Hari Kunzru, who often teaches Ernaux’s work to his writing students at New York University. Her work captured a moment of intense social change in France, away from traditional Catholic values and toward more secular, permissive and sexually liberated mores. She often situated her own private experiences and memories within the context of French culture and society, drawing parallels between her life and more universal struggles of women and working class people. She has described her prose as “brutally direct, working-class and sometimes obscene.” The experiences she wrote about in the 1980s and 1990s - an unwanted pregnancy and abortion, her love affairs, her ambivalence about marriage and motherhood - were considered shocking by some social conservatives, but resonated deeply with a broad readership.Įrnaux has described her writing as a political act, one meant to reveal entrenched social inequality, and has compared her use of language to “a knife.” She was influenced by Simone de Beauvoir, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and by the social upheaval of May 1968, when there were weeks of demonstrations, strikes and civil unrest in France. “And yet these are tremendous works of the imagination.” “Everything she writes, every word, is literal and factually true,” said Dan Simon, the founder of Seven Stories Press, which has been publishing Ernaux in English for 31 years. While early on in her career Ernaux wrote autobiographical fiction, she quickly cast off any pretense that she was inventing a plot and began writing memoirs, though she has often resisted labeling her work as either fiction or nonfiction. She is the second woman to receive the prize in three years after Louise Glück, the American poet, was given 2020’s award. “Speaking from my condition as a woman,” she said, “it does not seem to me that we, women, have become equal in freedom, in power.”Įrnaux becomes only the 17th woman to have been awarded the prize, which has been given to 119 writers since it was formed in 1901. She felt compelled, in particular, to keep examining the inequality and struggles that women face. “To receive the Nobel Prize is, for me, a responsibility to continue,” she said. Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which decides the prize, announced the decision at a news conference in Stockholm, lauding the “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”Īt a news conference at the Paris offices of her publisher, Gallimard, Ernaux, 82, promised to keep writing. It was a striking choice by the Nobel committee to honor a writer whose work is woven from intensely personal and often ordinary experiences.
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