Nobel laureate Annie Ernot warns of the danger of an “ideology of retreat”

The award-winning Nobel Prize in Literature Annie Ernot warned today of the danger of a “retreat ideology” which, in her opinion, is spreading in Europe, trying to exclude the weakest in society and limit women’s rights.

“There is in Europe— still covered by the violence of an imperialist war conducted by the dictator who leads Russia — the rise of an ideology of retreat and closure, which is spreading and steadily gaining ground in hitherto democratic countries in Europe,” she said in her Nobel speech in Stockholm, before receiving her award at Nobel Prize ceremony on Saturday.

“Based on the exclusion of foreigners and immigrantsin the abandonment of the economically weak, in the surveillance of women’s bodies, (this ideology) imposes on me, as on all those for whom the value of man is the same, always and everywhere, a duty of vigilance”, he added.

Form of feminism, Ani Erno was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature for “the vigor and clinical acuity with which he discovers the roots, distances and collective limitations of personal memory,” explained the Nobel committee.

Her writings, strongly inspired by her personal experiences in relation to class and gender, they take a critical look at the structures of society.

The author also referred to protests in Iran which broke out in mid-September after the death of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested in Tehran by the moral police.

The Nobel laureate explained that she started writing about her personal experiences because “a book can help to change a personal life, to break the loneliness of things that have been tried and buried, to think differently”, adding that “when the unspeakable comes to light, then that is political.”

“We see it today with the rebellion of those women who found the words to overthrow the authority of men and who rebelled, as in Iran, against the most violent and most archaic form of».

Having “grown up in the generation after the world war”, the 82-year-old author underlines “that it was a matter of course for writers and intellectuals to position themselves in terms of politics in France and to be involved in social struggles”.

“In today’s world, where the large number of imgs of information, the speed of replacing images with others, get used to a form of indifference, focusing on art is a temptation,” she notes, hoping her prize will be a “sign of justice and hope for all women writers”, whose “legitimacy to produce works has not yet been obtained”.