French writer Annie Ernaux awarded Nobel Prize in literature

French author Annie Ernaux, who mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for work that illuminates murky corners of memory, family and society.

The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” She is the first French literature laureate since Patrick Modiano in 2014.

Ernaux started out writing autobiographical novels, but quickly abandoned fiction in favor of memoirs.

Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said Ernaux had used the term “an ethnologist of herself” rather than a writer of fiction.

Her more than 20 books, most of them very short, chronicle events in her life and the lives of those around her. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of