French author wins Nobel Literature Prize

STOCKHOLM, Oct 6 (AFP): French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender, was on Thursday awarded the Nobel Literature Prize.

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, Ernaux called it a "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.

Personal experiences are the source for all of Ernaux's work and she is the pioneer of France's "autofiction" genre, which gives narrative form to real-life experience.

Above all, 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.

"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".

The chairman of the Nobel Committee, Anders Olsson, said Ernaux had "been under consideration for her books for many years".

"We have had very intensive discussions about her", he told Swedish news agency TT.

She debuted with the novel "Cleaned Out" in 1974, a cool-eyed but harrowing account of an abortion she went through in her youth and that she had kept secret from her family.

But it was her fourth book, "A Man's Place" from 1983 -- a dispassionate portrait of her father and the social milieu that formed him -- that started her literary breakthrough.