Nobel prize in literature 2022: French author Annie Ernaux announced as winner – as it happened

Thank you for joining us today for the liveblog. You can read the full story by Sarah Shaffi here.

The Nobel peace prize will be announced tomorrow at 10am BST (11:00 CEST).

Novelist Brandon Taylor jokes that “Perhaps modernity is saved” given Ernaux’s win

Who is Annie Ernaux?

The French novelist grew up in Normandy to working class parents. She is known for her mostly autobiographical work, such as A Woman’s Story, A Man’s Place, and Simple Passion. She started her literary career in 1974, and her work is so rooted in fact that some English-speaking critics and publishers have been tempted to categorise it as memoir. Ernaux herself has always been adamant that she writes fiction, however. Many of her works have been translated into English, and she was nominated for the International Booker prize in 2019 for her book The Years.

Her work is published in the US by Seven Stories Press. Ernaux is one of the seven founding authors from whom the press takes its name.

“We concentrate on literature and literary quality”, not on current affairs, the Swedish Academy has said. But it does feel poignant that an author known for her work about abortion has been selected in the year that the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.

Ernaux’s UK publisher Fitzcarraldo is “over the moon” that the long-tipped author has been chosen for this year’s award

Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Committee, said that he had not been able to reach Ernaux yet. He “expects her to become aware of the news soon.”

Read Angelique Chrisafis’s interview with Ernaux from 2019

The Nobel for literature has been turned down twice. Boris Pasternak, after accepting it in 1958, was forced to decline it by the Soviet Union. In 1964, Jean Paul Sartre turned it down because he had consistently declined all official honours.

It’s difficult to predict a winner for this year’s prize, given that there’s a 99.9% chance I’ll be wrong, but I’ll go ahead anyway and say that I think Margaret Atwood could be in with a chance.

My choice is pretty calculated: it’s unlikely that the academy will award two consecutive prizes to people from the same geographic region, and as last year’s prize was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar, that unfortunately rules out a number of truly excellent African writers. (I’d like to be very wrong here.)

The last Canadian to win was Alice Munro in 2013, so there’s a long enough gap between wins for the award to go to another Canadian legend. Plus, Atwood is in her 80s, and if now is not the time to honour her, when is?

And lastly, Atwood produces work that speaks to our political, cultural and social times, but she’s not faddy, something the Swedish Academy would surely shy away from.

So that’s my prediction. Apologies to Atwood in advance, I’m definitely wrong.

It begins!

Previous years have taught us that any Nobel predictions we make are usually very, very wrong … But that won’t stop us guessing every year! My money’s on French author Michel Houellebecq this year, who is also one of the bookies’ favourites.

It wouldn’t be right to do a Nobel prize live blog without sharing the hilarious video of 2007 winner Doris Lessing.

Over at The Atlantic, the New Republic’s staff writer Alex Shepherd said it’s a “fool’s errand” to try and predict the winner of the literature prize; admitting he’s got it wrong for seven years in a row.

This year, instead of winners, he’s picked authors who “have never won the prize” and likely won’t this year, but who have “over the past several decades, built up an astonishing and influential body of work”.

Shepherd’s first pick is Norwegian novelist and playwright Jon Fosse, who was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize this year for A New Name: Septology VI-VII, translated by Damion Searls.

Also on Shepherd’s list is French writer Annie Ernaux, who was last year’s bookies’ favourite to win, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who Shepherd describes as “arguably the most important and influential African novelist working today”. The 84-year-old regularly appears on lists of possible winners of the Nobel, but Shepherd says this year is particularly unlikely given the academy awarded an African writer, Abdulrazaq Gurnah, in 2021.

Chinese writer Can Xue and Australian author Gerald Murnane are the final two authors on Shepherd’s list.

Ellen Mattson, writer and member of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Committee, said the “world is full of very good, excellent writers, and you need something more to be a laureate”.

She said it’s difficult to explain what that something more is, but that it’s “something you’re born with, I think”. “The romantics would call it a divine spark,” she added.

Mattson also said there’s no age limit on writers who can be nominated, but it “takes quite a lot of time to be a good writer”.

“It is possible to find a laureate who is perhaps 30 or 40, but it’s highly unlikely because as I say, you need time to develop,” she continued. “It’s a mistime’s process to reach that level of excellence.”

Several people on Twitter are hoping for a Rushdie win

Last year’s winner was Abdulrazak Gurnah, making him the first Black African in 35 years to win the prize. Gurnah, who grew up on one of the islands of Zanzibar before fleeing persecution and arriving in England as a student in the 1960s, was praised by the Nobel for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

Here’s a roundup of the bookmakers’ favourites for this year’s prize

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Nobel prize in literature, which should be awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”, according to the will of Alfred Nobel.

This year’s winner will be announced at 12pm BST (1pm CEST). Will it be Salman Rushdie, a bookmaker’s favourite after he was stabbed at a public lecture earlier this year? Could it be another songwriter, like Bob Dylan, who was chosen in 2016? Or is it finally the year for Haruki Murakami, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o or Annie Ernaux – all names that are predicted year after year.

Join my colleague Sarah Shaffi and I for the next hour or so as we post updates, trivia and speculation about this year’s prize.