Annie Ernaux has said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes for social inequality
Nobel Prize: Annie Ernaux was honoured "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory", the jury said.
French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender, won the Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday, the jury announced.
Ms 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.
Interviewed on Swedish television immediately after the announcement, Ms Ernaux said it was "very great honour" and "a great responsibility".
Her more than 20 books, many of which have been school texts in France for decades, offer one of the most subtle, insightful windows into the social life of modern France.
Above all Ms Ernaux's crystalline prose has excavated her own passage from working-class girl to the literary elite, casting a critical eye on social structures and her own complicated emotions.
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", it said.
"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".
Annie Ernaux said that receiving the Nobel Literature Prize was a "great honour" but also a "great responsibility."
"I consider this to be a great honour for me and at the same time a great responsibility, a responsibility given to me," Ms Ernaux told public broadcaster SVT moments after the prize was announced.
WATCH THE ANNOUNCEMENT HERE