French author Annie Ernaux, who mined her biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for work that illuminates murky corners of memory, family and society.
The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for "the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory." She is the first French literature laureate since Patrick Modiano in 2014.
Ernaux started out writing autobiographical novels but quickly abandoned fiction in favor of memoirs.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said Ernaux had used the term "an ethnologist of herself" rather than a writer of fiction. Her more than 20 books, most of them very short, chronicle events in her life and the lives of those around her. They present uncompromising portraits of illness and the deaths of her parents. Olsson said Ernaux's work was often "uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean."
"She has achieved something admirable and enduring," he told reporters after the announcement in Stockholm, Sweden. Ernaux describes her style as "flat writing" - aiming for a very objective view of the events she is describing, unshaped by florid description or overwhelming emotions.
In the book that made her name, "La Place" (A Man’s Place), about her relationship with her father, she writes: "No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally."
Her most critically acclaimed book is "The Years" (Les annees), published in 2008 and describes herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the present day. Unlike in previous books, in "The Years," Ernaux writes about herself in the third person, calling her character "she" rather than "I." The book received numerous awards and honors.
"A Girl’s Story," from 2016, follows a young woman’s coming of age in the 1950s.
Ernaux is just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. Last year's winner, Tanzanian-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa, and the prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers, as well as too male-dominated.