Status: 06.10.2022 1:13 p.m
French writer Annie Ernaux has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. This was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
French writer Annie Ernaux has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. This was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. She received the award “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, alienations and collective limitations of personal memory,” said the permanent secretary of the Academy, Mats Malm, when the award winner was announced. You could not reach them by phone, said Malm.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is considered the most prestigious literary award in the world. There were 233 candidates on the so-called long list for the award this year – which names were among them is kept top secret every year. Like the other traditional Nobel prizes, the prize goes back to the will of the prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel. It was first awarded in 1901, at that time to the Frenchman Sully Prudhomme. Since then, almost 120 personalities have received it.
The youngest winner to date was the then 41-year-old “Jungle Book” author Rudyard Kipling in 1907, the oldest Doris Lessing, who received it in 2007 at the age of 88. Last year, the Tanzanian-British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah received the award.
Traditionally awarded on December 10th
As in the previous year, all Nobel prizes are endowed with ten million Swedish crowns (around 920,000 euros) per category. The awards are traditionally presented on December 10th in Sweden’s capital Stockholm, the anniversary of Nobel’s death. Due to the corona pandemic, the awardees received their prizes in their home country last year, and a reduced ceremony took place in Stockholm. In 2020 it was canceled entirely.
The Prize for Literature is the fourth Nobel Prize awarded this week. The Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Physics and Chemistry had already been awarded on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday and the award for economics on Monday, which is the only category not based on Nobel’s will.