I Will Write to Avenge My People: The Nobel Lecture
Annie Ernaux, Alison L. Strayer (translation)«J’écrirai por venger ma race»
It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defense of literature & of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 2022.
To write of her own life, she asserts, is to “shatter the loneliness of experiences endured & repressed;” to mine individual experience is to find collective emancipation. Ernaux’s speech is a bold assertion of the capacity of writing to give people a sense of their own worth, & of one writer’s commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys & its injustices.
Includes Annie Ernaux's Nobel lecture, her Nobel banquet speech, a congratulatory speech by Professor Anders Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, & the Nobel opening address by Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, Chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation.
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ANNIE ERNAUX is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place & the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. She received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, & the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
Alison L. Strayer is a Canadian writer & translator. She won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, & her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature & for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, the Prix littéraire France-Québec, & the Man Booker International Prize.