Nobel Prize in Literature 2022

Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 was awarded to Ms. Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

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Nobel Prize in Literature 2022- Relevance for UPSC Exam

GS Paper 2: Indian culture will cover the salient aspects of Art Forms, Literature and Architecture from ancient to modern times.

Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 in News

Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 was awarded to French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender.
Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 was awarded to Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

Who is Annie Ernaux?

Annie Ernaux is a French national. Annie Ernaux is 82 years old. Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Yvetot, a small town in Normandy where her parents had a grocery store and cafe.
She has authored more than 20 books, many of which have been school texts in France for decades.
Her writings offer one of the most subtle, insightful windows into the social life of modern France.
Personal experiences are the source for all of Ms. Ernaux’s work and she is the pioneer of France’s “autofiction” genre, which gives narrative form to real-life experience.
The experiences she wrote about in the 1980s and 1990s- an unwanted pregnancy and abortion, her love affairs, her ambivalence about marriage and motherhood- were considered shocking by some social conservatives, but resonated deeply with a broad readership.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The prestigious international Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded annually for outstanding work in literature.
Nobel Prize in Literature was first given in 1901 by members of Swedish learned societies.
- It was first won by Sully Prudhomme, “in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect”.
Interestingly, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 114 times to 118 Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2021 for an entire body of work and not just one work.

List of Previous Nobel Prize in Literature Winners

Nobel Prize in Literature 2021: It was awarded to Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
Nobel Prize in Literature 2020: American poet Louise Gluck won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature.
- According to the jury, Louise Glück won it “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
Nobel Prize in Literature 2019: he Nobel Prize in Literature 2019 was awarded to Peter Handke “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”.
Nobel Prize in Literature 2018: It was awarded to Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.
Nobel Prize in Literature 2017: It was won by Japanese-American writer Kazuo Ishiguro.
- Jury said that his works have come to be a “great emotional force, and has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.
Nobel Prize in Literature 2016: It was awarded to American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Nobel Prize in Literature 2015: Svetlana Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
Nobel Prize in Literature 2014: It was awarded to Patrick Modiano “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”
Nobel Prize in Literature 2013: it was won by Alice Munro. The jury statement noted that she is the “master of the contemporary short story”.
Nobel Prize in Literature 2012: Chinese writer Mo Yan won The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012. According to the Swedish Academy, the writer “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”.