French writer Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022. 

The 82-year-old author was announced the winner on Thursday in a statement on the Nobel Prize organisation’s website. 

She was awarded the prize for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, arrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”

Ms Ernaux is respected for her writings about daily life in France and non-fiction.

“In her writing, Ernaux consistently and from different angles examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language, and class. Her path to authorship was long and arduous,” the Nobel statement added. 

After the United States Supreme Court overturned federal protection for sexual health choices, Ms Ernaux wrote more about abortion. Her novel, Happening, encapsulated the theme when it detailed how she got an illegal backstreet abortion in 1963. 

“There were thousands who had been through secret abortions. I wanted to recreate the truth of it exactly as it was in the moment, ridding myself of any knowledge of the fight for women’s rights that would follow,” the author told the UK Guardian in 2019.

Ms Ernaux has won at least 13 awards, including the Prix Renaudot in 2008 for her autobiography ‘The Years’, translated into English by Alison Strayer and nominated for the Man Booker International Award in 2019.

Following the announcement, Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature, described her as having renewed literature in many ways. 

“She is a wonderful writer, and she has renewed literature in many ways. On one hand, she has a foot in the French tradition and the heritage that supports and can assuage the wealth of her experience in childhood and so forth and that is very important for her,” said Mr Olsson.

He added, “Also, she guides this surge in such a quite new direction and a more social context and that is wonderful. She gives us a scale back of the heritage of the poor and the ambitious people living in the countryside and she does it with such clarity and vividness that is unwavering. It is very strong prose, both brief and uncompromising at the same time.”