<p>Nobel Prizes usually have an element of surprise about them and that is more real in the case of those for peace and literature, because the potential recipients are more widely known and there is often a build-up of expectations about many of them. French writer Annie Ernaux, who won this year’s Prize for literature, was not among the probables or the favourites to win it, but the surprise does not detract from the value of the award or make her undeserving of the prize. She is among the world’s noted writers and only the 17th woman in the history of the prize to receive it, more notably for telling the woman’s story in many variations, drawing upon her own experiences, with sincerity, courage and insight. She has been variously described as a memorialist, an autobiographer, a writer of auto fiction and, in her own words, an “ethnologist of herself”. But she remains basically a writer who, trying to discover and express herself as a person and a woman, described with great insight the society she is part of and the times she lives in. </p>.<p>Ernaux belongs to the post-War modernist generation in France which saw Simone de Beauvoir defining woman differently, the New Wave redefining art, and the Barricades making rebellion a household word. Her writing has elements of all these, and she drew upon herself to tell the stories. The Nobel citation praised Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. She wrote about her body without fear and shame and about her life as a woman, and wrote it with clarity, intelligence and felicity. She mined her memory and reconstructed the events, passions, people and relationships that formed her past and told them with deep feeling but without sentimentality. She used memory to record and to rebel, and moulded out of her personal experiences of love, ambition, relationships, gender insecurity and class inferiority, trauma related to sexual aggression and an illegal abortion, and worries of old age and ailments a world which everyone could relate to. It has the stamp of time, place and person on it, but has an appeal that goes beyond them. </p>.<p>While her literary achievement is remarkable and she would well deserve the honour, the questions which so often arise in the Nobel season arise this time too. Those questions are why the Prize often refuses to leave Europe and America and the languages spoken there, and why writers from other parts of the world, who are no less deserving, end up only on the short list or don’t even reach there. </p>
<p>Nobel Prizes usually have an element of surprise about them and that is more real in the case of those for peace and literature, because the potential recipients are more widely known and there is often a build-up of expectations about many of them. French writer Annie Ernaux, who won this year’s Prize for literature, was not among the probables or the favourites to win it, but the surprise does not detract from the value of the award or make her undeserving of the prize. She is among the world’s noted writers and only the 17th woman in the history of the prize to receive it, more notably for telling the woman’s story in many variations, drawing upon her own experiences, with sincerity, courage and insight. She has been variously described as a memorialist, an autobiographer, a writer of auto fiction and, in her own words, an “ethnologist of herself”. But she remains basically a writer who, trying to discover and express herself as a person and a woman, described with great insight the society she is part of and the times she lives in. </p>.<p>Ernaux belongs to the post-War modernist generation in France which saw Simone de Beauvoir defining woman differently, the New Wave redefining art, and the Barricades making rebellion a household word. Her writing has elements of all these, and she drew upon herself to tell the stories. The Nobel citation praised Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. She wrote about her body without fear and shame and about her life as a woman, and wrote it with clarity, intelligence and felicity. She mined her memory and reconstructed the events, passions, people and relationships that formed her past and told them with deep feeling but without sentimentality. She used memory to record and to rebel, and moulded out of her personal experiences of love, ambition, relationships, gender insecurity and class inferiority, trauma related to sexual aggression and an illegal abortion, and worries of old age and ailments a world which everyone could relate to. It has the stamp of time, place and person on it, but has an appeal that goes beyond them. </p>.<p>While her literary achievement is remarkable and she would well deserve the honour, the questions which so often arise in the Nobel season arise this time too. Those questions are why the Prize often refuses to leave Europe and America and the languages spoken there, and why writers from other parts of the world, who are no less deserving, end up only on the short list or don’t even reach there. </p>
