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Stockholm (AFP) – French writer Annie Ernaux paid tribute on Saturday evening to the French literary giant Albert Camus after receiving his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, 65 years after the author of “The Stranger”.
During her acceptance speech at the grand banquet celebrating the 2022 winners in the Swedish capital, the 82-year-old author expressed her “gratitude” to be listed alongside Camus, Nobel Literature 1957.
“Finding myself here, sixty-five years later, leaves me with a deep sense of astonishment and gratitude,” declared Annie Ernaux to the 2,000 guests gathered at Stockholm City Hall.
“Amazement at the mystery represented by a path of life and a hazardous, solitary pursuit of writing. Gratitude for allowing me to join Camus, and these deceased or contemporary writers whom I admire”, she said. said.
Mrs. Ernaux, the first French woman to win the supreme award after 15 French people, also greeted “those who are not here, these men and women who have sometimes found in my books reasons to live and to fight, to feel more proud”.
“By rewarding my work, you force me to be even more demanding in the search for a reality and a shareable truth”, she said, her voice imbued with emotion.
Along with the other “Swedish” Nobel laureates (medicine, physics, chemistry and economics) announced in October, she received her prize earlier in the afternoon from the hands of the King of Sweden, during the traditional ceremony held in Stockholm.
In Oslo, the Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian laureates of the peace prize called for them not to lower the arms against the “crazy and criminal” war that Vladimir Putin launched in Ukraine.
© 2022 AFP