French writer Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the panel said was an "uncompromising" 40-year body of work exploring "a life marked by great disparities regarding gender, language and class". The prestigious accolade is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish kronor (£807,000). She said it was "a great honour". Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, chair of the committee, said the 82-year-old's work was "admirable and enduring". He said she used "courage and clinical acuity" to uncover "the contradictions of social experience [and] describe shame, humiliation, jealousy or the inability to see who you are".
'Liberating force of writing'
Ernaux, who was a teacher before becoming a writer, was born in Seine-Maritime, France, in 1940. Her books, including A Man's Place and A Woman's Story, are considered to be contemporary classics in France. Prof Heldin added: "Annie Ernaux manifestly believes in the liberating force of writing. Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean." Another of Ernaux's books, The Years, won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008, and the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016, while a year later she won the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life's work.
The University of St Andrews' Annie Ernaux website says: "Her main themes threaded through her work over more than four decades, are: the body and sexuality; intimate relationships; social inequality and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to write these life experiences." The Nobel Prizes, awarded since 1901, recognize achievement in literature, science, peace and latterly economics. Last year's literary prize was won by Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. Other winners have included novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, plus poets such as Louise Gluck, Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky and Rabindranath Tagore, and playwrights including Harold Pinter and Eugene O'Neill.
