French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Ernaux, 82, was honoured “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”, the jury said in making the announcement on Thursday night.
Ernaux said the prize was a “great honour” and “responsibility”.
Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory. She writes in the first person, and then abruptly switches and speaks about herself from a distance, calling past selves “the girl of ’58” or “the girl of S.” At times, it seems as though she were looking at herself in an old photograph or a scene in a movie. She tells us when she is getting lost in the story, and where her memory goes blank. Ernaux does not so much reveal the past—she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it—as unpack it. “What is the point of writing,” she says, “if not to unearth things?”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/a-memoirist-who-mistrusts-her-own-...I have never come across her name. But then again, I only recognise four of the last dozen winners.