French Writer Annie Ernaux awarded Nobel Prize in Literature
To explore life in France since the 1940s this year on Thursday French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in literature for blending fiction and autobiography in books that fearlessly mine her experiences as a working-class woman. Ernaux has probed deeply personal experiences and feelings – love, sex, abortion, shame within a society split by gender and class divisions over five decades in more than 20 books published. “In power, it doesn’t seem to me that women have become equal in freedom” Ernaux said and to abortion and contraception she strongly defended women’s rights, after a half-century of defending feminist ideals. At a news conference in Paris she said that “I will fight to my last breath so that women can choose to be a mother, or not to be. It’s a fundamental right”. Before it was legalized in France Ernaux’s first book, “Cleaned Out,” was about her own illegal abortion. In her small-town background in the Normandy region of northwest France the prize-giving Swedish Ac...