Annie Ernaux has been named as the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The French author was announced as the winner at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Thursday (6 October).
Ernaux, 82, was awarded the prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
However, the Swedish Academy said that they had not been able to reach Ernaux by phone to tell her the good news yet.
On Twitter, they wrote: “The 2022 #NobelPrize laureate in literature Annie Ernaux believes in the liberating force of writing. Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.”
Born in Normandy in 1940, Ernaux trained as a school teacher and taught throughout the 1970s before published her first book in 1974.
Her switch from fiction to autobiographical writing came very early in her career, and she penned her first autobiographical novel Les Armoires vides aged 34.
She has continued to write about her own life and subjects such as her parents, her abortion, her affair and breast cancer throughout her works.
In 1984, Ernaux won the Renaudot Prize for La Place, in which she grappled with her relationship with her father.
In 2008, she penned Les Années, considered by many to be her magnum opus. In the book, Ernaux wrote in the third person for the first time, with the award winning multiple prizes.
She was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019.
Ernaux will be presented with the Nobel Prize in Literature, consisting of a gold medal, diploma and 10m SEK (£1m) cash prize, on 10 December.
Her publisher Fitzcarraldo tweeted that they were “over the moon” with Ernaux’s win.
Last year’s prize was awarded to Tanzanian-born British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, who received the award for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
He was the first Black writer to win the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993.
