Winner of Nobel Prize for Literature and Booker shortlist

“It was a way to save life, save from nothingness – the thing that most resembles it” so admitted the 2022 Nobel Prize winner writing about her book of diary entries of an affair she had with a younger man in 1988-90. Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901 for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature in Stockholm, Sweden. I was glad to note literature was included among the ‘hard’ science subjects. The Peace Prize was also first awarded that year but from Oslo, Norway.

This year a French woman novelist who writes autobiographically won the Literature Prize; she being the 17^th woman to be awarded the prize among, so far, 119 Literature Nobel Laureates. Louise Gluck, American poet, won in 2020 and 82-year old Annie Ernaux carried away the award for 2022. Of the previous 16 women Nobel Laureates, the more familiar (at least to me) are short story writer, Irish/Scottish Alice Munro (1931-) who won the Nobel in 2013 and British/ Zimbabwean Doris Lessing (1919-2013), winner in 2007. Asians who have won the Lit Nobel are Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali (1881-1941) who won in 1913; Yasunani Kawabata, Japanese (1899-1994) in 1968, Kenzaburo Oe, Japanese (1935 – ) in 1974 and Gao Xingjian, Chinese, (1940 -) in 2000. American balladeer Bob Dylan receiving the prize in 2016 resulted in much controversy. The Nobel is awarded considering the writer’s total output of creative writing, and perhaps the influence s/he has had.

Annie Ernaux (1940-) writes in French but many of her 20 novels have been translated to English and published in the US, so she is known to the Western and English reading world. I admit I have not read her nor knew of her, but take delight in the fact of a woman winning this most prestigious prize. I however read widely on her, particularly the New York Times comments and critiques and shall quote from these.

The 2022 Nobel Laureate for Literature

“For decades, Annie Ernaux had dissected the most humiliating, private and scandalous moments from her past with almost clinical precision.” Her writing has spoken particularly to women and to others who, like her, come from the working class “seldom depicted with such clarity in literature.” She has described her upbringing in a small town in Normandy where her parents owned a grocery store and café. She described graphically her father attempting to murder her mother when she was 12 years old; the first sentence in her memoir Shame being this fact. She felt compelled, in particular, to keep examining the inequality and struggles that women face. “Speaking from my condition as a woman,” she said, “it does not seem to me that we women have become equal in freedom, in power.” She described her work as a political act meant to reveal entrenched social inequality and her writing on this viewpoint is compared to her using a knife as language. She was hugely influenced by Simone de Beauvoir.

She first attempted writing for publication when in College, but her mss was rejected. She took up writing again when she was 30; a teacher, married with two children. That effort led to her 1974 debut novel Cleaned Out, deeply autobiographical and kept secret from her husband, pretending it was her PhD thesis she was working on. He belittled her writing until she was published by a renowned French publishing house. The marriage was stormy and finally ended in divorce when her third book – A Frozen Woman 1981 was out and acclaimed. She did not remarry preferring to live alone.

Commercial success came to her with Simple Passions in 1992, a very candid and detailed account of a relationship with a Russian diplomat, much younger to her. She was obsessed by him and in her autobiographical novel as diary entries, plunged into revealing female desire and passion. “I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself” she wrote in her 1997 memoir Shame. This detailed a love relationship she had when 18 (1958) which shamed her, left her feeling deserted and resulted in a nervous condition, succumbing to an eating disorder.She started off writing autobiographical fiction but cast off any pretense she was inventing a plot and went on to writing memoirs; refusing to label her work fiction or nonfiction. A coined term names her genre of authorship – autofiction.

She re-wrote about her first sexual experience in her 2000 memoir Happening. “Everything she writes, every word, is literal and factually true, but tremendous works of the imagination,” notes Dan Simon, the founder of Seven Stories Press which publishes her translations to English in America for the past 31 years. Another comment by a fellow woman writer “She achieved a hugely important formal revolution in literature, away from metaphors, pretty sentences and characters. She didn’t try to fit into existing definitions of literature, of what is beautiful: She came up with her own.”

Some of her readers did not approve of her candid honesty, but most – women particularly – approved. So different to what pertains in Sri Lanka. Write a novel or short story including an adulterous love affair and the author is thought to be writing about herself!! Also most writing purposely remains prudish, fearing censure and attribution of what is fictional to the truth about the writer. However, this tendency cannot be faulted completely, since our English readership is limited and conservative too. A comment on the Nobel Committee’s choice of honouring this writer and her work is that it was striking; an author who writes intensely personally and of ordinary experiences. At a news conference following the announcement, Ernaux promised to keep writing. “To receive the Nobel Prize is, for me, a responsibility to continue.”

Short listed for Booker Prize

We in Sri Lanka are particularly interested in the announcement of the Booker Prize winner for 2022 on October 17, since Shehan Karunatilaka is in the running having been short-listed from the long list of 16. “A bleak but slyly funny story that explores the trauma of Sri Lanka’s civil wars” reads an analysis of Shehan’s entry – The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida –

“mythic story follows a photographer who wakes up dead in an underworld where he encounters victims of political violence.”

Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory “obliquely tackles the downfall of the autocrat Robert Mugabe, through a narrative featuring a cast of animals”; American Percival Everett, Distinguished Prof of English in the University of Southern California, in his entry The Trees uses the story of two black detectives who investigate murders that echo the lynching of Emmet Till to expose racism in America. Small Things Like These is Irish writer Claire Keegan’s slim novel about the suffering of unmarried women and their children in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; English writer, Alan Garner, in Treacle Walker writes about a boy who has magical visions; and American Elizabth Strout in Oh William! deals with a grieving woman who helps her ex-husband investigate his troubled family.

(NOTE: I report, not having read or even seen the mentioned books in a bookshop I visit. A friend downloaded Ernaux from his kindle and did not take to her writing. Typical of a man to be put off by absolute candidness of a woman in man-relationships!)

Sri Lankans and the Booker Prize Michael Ondaatje

magnanimously says he is Sri Lankan Canadian, even though he left Sri Lanka in his pre-teens to England and settled down in Canada. This fact endears him to us and his returning often to his country of birth. Single handedly, almost, he gave a tremendous boost to Sri Lankan English fiction writing and local readership with his placing the money he got from winning the Booker in 1992 for his novel English Patient in trust, to award the annual Gratiaen Prize for creative writing. To crown his many other successes and prizes won, he was selected winner of the Golden Booker Prize in 2018 which recognizes the best book for a decade.

Anuk Arudpragasm

though living in the UK says he is Sri Lankan. He was short listed for the Booker in 2021 for his second work of fiction, though very factual – A passage to the North. His first book –The Story of a Brief Marriage – also situated in Sri Lanka, won him the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Shehan won it too.

This little dot of an island in the Indian ocean is on the literary world map. We hope fervently that Shehan Karunatilaka with be the Booker winner this year. The success of Shehan and Anuk are doubly great as the Booker now judges books from American writers – almost doubling the contenders to compete with, while previously it was Commonwealth and ex- Commonwealth countries that were eligible.