French author Annie Ernaux is the winner of the 2022 Novel Prize in Literature.
The news must be deflating for many admirers of renowned Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o who have each year waited for him to be declared a Nobel laurette.
In its citation on Thursday afternoon, the Swedish Academy said that Ernaux (who writes in French) was awarded the coveted prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
Ahead of the announcement, bookmakers had tipped British author Salman Rushdie among likely winners of the prize.
Apart from Ngugi, the Nobel has also been elusive to other popular authors like Haruki Murakami and Margaret Atwood whose fans were also on edge hoping they would be declared the winner.
Renowned author Chinua Achebe did also not win the award despite his works being among the most widely read in Africa and all over the world.
What will further frustrate fans of Ngugi is that it will take them long to know why he keeps on missing out since the names of nominees and other information about the nominations cannot be revealed by the Swedish Academy until after 50 years.
Ngugi’s son, Mukoma wa Ngugi, who is also a writer and professor probably best captured the expectation many readers of his father’s literary works had. He tweeted:
“Nobel Prize for Literature fatigue, decades in the making, has finally set in. Sign, oh well (in a deflated tone) let us see if baba @NgugiWaThiongo finally brings it home this year”.
After the announcement of the winner, scholar Joyce Nyairo simply tweeted: “Yes: the Nobel goes to Europe.”
In awarding Ernaux the winner, the Academy observed that through her writing, she “consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class.
Her path to authorship was long and arduous. Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.”
“With great courage and clinical acuity, Annie Ernaux 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 Academy said.
The 82-year-old writer was born in Lillebonne, Normandy. She refers to her writing as a knife with which she uses to “open” people’s eyes to social inequality and “to tear apart the veils of imagination”.
She published her first novel, Cleaned Out in 1974. It is a fictionalised account of the illegal abortion she underwent in 1964, and her move from working-class to middle-class culture through education.
The Years, published in 2008 is considered by many to be her most notable work and a crowning achievement in terms both of its content and innovative form.
It is her personal and collective history over six decades. Its English translation was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International.
She will add the Nobel to the French language prize and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize which she has won in the past.
“We have many different criteria and we can’t satisfy all. Our focus must be on literary quality as much as possible,” a member of the committee said when asked about how they arrived at the decision.
The nomination process involves the Nobel Committee for Literature sending out invitation letters to selected persons.
These include members of the Swedish Academy and of other academies which are similar to it, professors of literature and of linguistics at universities and university colleges and previous Nobel Prize laureates in literature.
After nominations and considerations, the committee selects between 15 and 20 names as preliminary candidates. This is usually done in April of every year.
The following month, the committee selects the final shortlist of five candidates. They also prepare individual reports and forwards them to the 18-member Academy who read and assess the work of the final candidates. After deliberations, they select the laurette.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 was awarded to Zanzibari-born Abdulrazak Gurnah for what the Swedish Academy termed “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents".
