Baku, October 6, AZERTAC French author Annie Ernaux, who has mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for work that illuminates murky corners of memory, family and society, according to AP. Ernaux’s autobiographical books explore deeply personal experiences and feelings – love, sex, abortion, shame – within a changing web of social and class relationships. Much of her material came out of her experiences being raised in a working-class family in the Normandy region of northwest France.The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity” of her writing.Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said Ernaux is “an extremely honest writer who is not afraid to confront the hard truths.”“She writes about things that no one else writes about, for instance her abortion, her jealousy, her experiences as an abandoned lover and so forth. I mean, really hard experiences,” he said after the award announcement in Stockholm. “And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking. They are short books, but they are really moving.”Ernaux is just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates and is the first French literature laureate since Patrick Modiano in 2014. One of France’s most-garlanded authors and a prominent feminist voice, she expressed surprise at the award, asking a Swedish journalist who reached her by phone: “Are you sure?”