I Will Write to Avenge My People
The Nobel Lecture
Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible edition, the essential lecture delivered by the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux.
«J’écrirai 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…