I Will Write to Avenge My People: The Nobel Lecture

＂＂J’âecrirai 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 and 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 and 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, and of one writer’s commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys and 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, and the Nobel opening address by Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, Chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation＂--

Winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 2022, Annie Ernaux is considered one of Europe’s most important contemporary writers. She has expanded the very meaning of literature and has asserted her feminism and class consciousness in the stories she tells.

Alison L. Strayer has been the translator of all of Annie Ernaux’s books since The Years (2017).

Carl-Henrik Heldin is a molecular biologist and medical researcher. He currently serves as Chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation.

Anders Olsson is a literary historian, writer, and professor of literature. He is the current Chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature.