French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experiences of class and gender, has been announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature for 2022.
Ernaux was honoured “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”, the jury at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm said.
Her 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.
The prize carries a cash award of SEK 10 million (nearly USD 900,000), which will be handed out on December 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
Last year’s literature prize went to the Tanzanian-born, UK-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose novels explore the impact of migration on individuals and societies.
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 has been jointly awarded to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced last week.
The laureates represent civil society in their home countries, said the committee, “They have for many years promoted the right to criticise power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens. They have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power. Together they demonstrate the significance of civil society for peace and democracy,” it said on the Nobel website.
With the awardees being from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, an implicit message has been sent about the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. “The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to honour three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence in the neighbour countries Belarus, Russia and Ukraine,” said the committee.
The Guardian reported Berit Reiss-Andersen, the head of the Nobel committee, as responding to a question on whether the prize was “a timely birthday president” to Vladimir Putin on the Russian president’s 70th birthday which falls on October 7. She said the prize is not being addressed to him, and that “we always give a prize for something and to somebody and not against anyone”.
Alain Aspect, John F Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”. Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2022 has gone to Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded 54 times to 92 laureates between 1969 and 2022. Ben S Bernanke, Douglas W Diamond and Philip H Dybvig have won the 2022 prie “for research on banks and financial crises”.
Between 1901 and 2021, the Nobel Prizes and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel were awarded 609 times to 975 people and organisations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 943 individuals and 25 organisations.