The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory".

Her books are followed by a wide readership, and are reviewed in most local and national newspapers in France, as well as being the subject of many radio and television interviews and programmes, and a large and growing international academic literature.

"[9] Interviewed by Claire Paetku, correspondent of the Nobel Prize's Outreach, Annie Ernaux confessed she learned about her win at around one o'clock while she was in her kitchen listening to her radio.

"[11][12]Right after the Swedish Academy announced Ernaux as the recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, it immediately received numerous praises from literary societies and critics.

Jacques Testard, from Fitzcarraldo Editions which publishes the English translations of her works, described her as "exceptional and unique" and a "very important feminist" writer of the contemporary times.

"[14][13] Professor Ruth Cruickshank, who specialises in contemporary French fiction at Royal Holloway, University of London, said: "When a woman wins the Nobel Prize for Literature it is always great news.

Thirteen dead and two living white French men (Le Clézio and Modiano) have been Nobel laureates since 1901... Ernaux explores memories of life experiences – both extraordinary and relatable – a backstreet abortion; failed affairs whether with a lover in Russia or a man 30 years younger; the death of her parents; breast cancer.

"[15] David Levitz of the DW News, described her as "an obscure choice" compared to authors Salman Rushdie and Michel Houellebecq, despite being the favorite to win in 2021.

[19] Interviewed by a Euronews journalist whether he was disappointed that he was not awarded this year, despite being nominated annually, Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare replied that he had no such feelings.

Ernaux delivered her Nobel lecture on December 7, 2022, and spoke of how she hopes her work, which mixes fiction and memoir, has affected others, or in her own words, "shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed and enable beings to reimagine themselves.

Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, Jane Eyre, the tales of Grimm and Andersen, David Copperfield, Gone with the Wind, and later Les Misérables, The Grapes of Wrath, Nausea, The Stranger: chance, more than the school's prescriptions, determined what I read.

Nobel Committee chairman Anders Olsson described her as an author who regards "language [as] a means to dispel the fog of memory and a knife to uncover the real".

Relentlessly, Ernaux exposes the shame that penetrates class experience... An unrelenting gaze and a plain style are [her] characteristics, and that she succeeds in making her pain relevant to all.

So I discovered, with a mixture of pride and delight, that the author of L’étranger and L’homme révolté, two texts that had deeply affected me, had just been honored by the greatest arbiter of distinction in the world.

[33][34][35] Among the authors calling to recognize Rushdie were French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy,[36] French Minister of Culture Françoise Nyssen, British writers Ian McEwan and Neil Gaiman, Indian writers Kavery Nambisan and Adil Jussawalla,[35] and Canadian author Margaret Atwood who declared, "If we don’t defend free speech, we live in tyranny: Salman Rushdie shows us that.

But, after all its bewildering choices, the Swedish Academy has the opportunity, by answering the ugliness of a state-issued death sentence with the dignity of its highest award, to rebuke all the clerics, autocrats, and demagogues—including our own—who would galvanize their followers at the expense of human liberty.

"[33] Rushdie, known for his controversial 1988 novel The Satanic Verses which earned him a fatwā from Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini, has annually been included in the Ladbrokes odds.

[42][43] Rushdie is noted for his literary works such as Midnight's Children (1981), The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), Shalimar the Clown (2005), and Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012), an account of his life in the wake of the events following The Satanic Verses.