French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender, has won the Nobel Literature Prize.
Ernaux, 82, was honored "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory," the jury said.
Interviewed on Swedish television immediately after the announcement, Ernaux called it a "very great honor" and "a great responsibility."
Her legacy is the grit in the French literary oyster, or as she puts it, to offer an alternative to the "unconditional admiration for the pretty phrase."
"In her writing, Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class," the Swedish Academy noted.
"Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.
"And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring."
