[News Figures] Nobel Literature Prize Winner Annie Ernaux Testifies to the Lives of Women and Workers

"Do Not Write Fiction Without Experience" Challenging Taboos Like Adultery and Abortion
Portraying the Lives of Women and Workers with Unadorned, Direct Style

(Serge Loiter = Yonhap News) French writer Annie Ernaux (82), who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, is meeting with reporters and giving an interview in front of her home.

[Asia Economy, So Jong-seop, Political and Social Affairs Editor, Kim Yoon-jin, Intern Reporter] Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, is a writer who has faced personal life from the perspectives of class and gender. Her candid and sometimes provocative narration has often been a subject of controversy. However, she has never stopped her 'sharp writing' that exposes social inequality.

Born in Lillebonne, France in 1940 and raised in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy, Ernaux spent her childhood under parents who were small business owners. After graduating from the Faculty of Literature at the University of Rouen, she worked as a secondary school teacher, passed the modern literature professor qualification exam in 1971, and served as a literature professor from 1977 to 2000. She debuted as a writer in 1974 with her autobiographical novel .

Ernaux is regarded as a writer who has built a unique literary world with an objective and calm style, without flamboyant rhetoric or emotional descriptions. Under the principle of "not writing fiction that has not been directly experienced," she pursued factual narration of experience and received praise for "overturning the premise of literature." Ernaux compares her straightforward writing to a 'knife,' explaining it as a political act to reveal entrenched social inequality.

Her works are recognized for viewing personal experiences from social and cultural perspectives, particularly representing the universal suffering of women and the working class. In this process, she has also stirred controversy by factually describing socially taboo subjects. Her representative work , published in 1991, shocked the literary world at the time with its intense and provocative depiction of an extramarital affair. The 2000 publication contains her experience of illegal abortion in 1963.

Ernaux’s works have been recognized worldwide beyond her home country, France. She won the Renault Prize, one of France’s four major literary awards, in 1984 for , the starting point of her biographical and social novels, and received numerous French literary awards such as the Marguerite Duras Prize and the T?l?gramme Readers’ Prize for her 2008 memoir . was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019, gaining her global recognition. The film 'L’?v?nement,' based on , won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival last year.

Ernaux, who had been a perennial Nobel Prize candidate appearing on the nominee lists every year, was finally selected as the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate on the 6th. She is the 17th female laureate among 119 Nobel literature winners and the first female laureate in two years since American poet Louise Gl?ck in 2020. The Swedish Academy cited "courage and unadorned sharpness in revealing the roots of personal memory and alienation, and collective restraint" as the reason for her selection.

Regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, Ernaux expressed a "sense of responsibility to continue standing against injustice" and stated that she will continue the struggle "for the rights of women and the oppressed."