I’m glad Annie Ernaux won the Nobel prize for literature this year. It’s been great reading her books and thinking a lot. She tripled my desire for creative non-fiction, a genre I’ve been trying to develop on my blog this year. Apart from making me think, reading her books made me feel a sense of urgency. This urgency was something I started to feel when I listened to Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2017. This urgency drives me to tell my story, the ones I’ve mentally replayed every night before falling asleep. 

Earlier in the year, I started and couldn’t finish some non-fiction books because they weren’t making me think. Some of them contained things that were already obvious to me, while others were filled with trites or platitudes. Many start well and then become a soup of words as the book progresses. It was hard to find something new to hook me, so I only read Murakami’s fiction because it made me think and gave me new insights into certain things. Murakami’s work made me see the world differently, even though he’s a fiction writer.

The importance of Annie winning the Nobel prize is that great work was brought into the limelight for many of us to notice. I was hoping that Haruki Murakami would win the Nobel Prize. Still, Annie deserved to win the prize, especially at a time like this when most of us are searching for mental and intellectual stimulation. Annie's work speaks not only to palpable things but also to things we deeply feel but can’t see, touch, or describe.

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