The French author Annie Ernaux has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday.
"For the boldness and clinical clarity with which she reveals the origins, estrangements, and collective restrictions of personal memory," the academy lauded Ernaux.
The school stated in its release that it had not yet been able to get in touch with Ernaux to tell her the news personally.
According to the Associated Press, she subsequently told Sweden's SVT television that receiving the Nobel Prize was both "a wonderful pleasure" and "a very significant responsibility."
Personal history issues appear regularly in Ernaux's writing. In her autobiography "Happening," she talks about an illicit abortion she had in the 1960s.
Her book "The Years," which was translated in 2018, made the Booker Prize shortlist. In 2018 a translation of Ernaux's journal of romance with a younger, married man "Getting Lost," was published.
As a working-class child, Ernaux was born in Normandy in 1940. She released "Cleaned Out," a dramatised story of her abortion, as her debut novel in 1974.
She resides in Cergy, a suburb of Paris in the northwest, with her two sons. She has won several literary awards in French, including the Prix Renaudot.
"Annie Ernaux's work might provoke the same emotion that some modern art does in viewers: a predisposition to imagine that, since it seems simple
or straightforward in composition, it was simple to conceive, that anybody could make the same forms and sensations," author Linda Barrett Osborne remarked in 1996.