Context
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.
About Nobel Prize in Literature
- The prestigious international Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded annually for outstanding work in literature.
- The 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.
About the Annie Ernaux
- Ernaux, née Duchesne, was born in Lillebonne Normandy in 1940.
- She worked as a schoolteacher, and as a teacher at the Centre for Distance Education.
- She retired in 2000, devoting herself fully to her writing.
- Her writings offer one of the most subtle, insightful windows into the social life of modern France.
- More than 20 of her books have been school texts in France for decades.
- According to the jury, she was honored “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
Contribution of Indians
- Poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European and Indian to get a Nobel Prize in 1913 in literature.
