The Nobel Literature Prizes are awarded to the persons who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction. The followings are some famous female winners in recent years.

Herta Müller (from Germany)

The Nobel Prize winner in Literature 2009. Her works are rooted in her experiences as one of Romania’s German-speaking racial minority. Muller describes how dictatorship(独裁)causes a fear and sense of distance that stays in an individual’s mind. With precise language, she recalls images from the past.

Svetlana Alexievich (from Belarus)

The Nobel Prize winner in Literature 2015. Svetlana Alexievich represents life during and after the Soviet Union(苏联)through the experience of individuals. She uses interviews to create a picture of a wide range of voices. Her books are a combination of oral history and deeply psychological literature, composed of stories collected on a simple tape recorder.

Louise Glück (from America)

The Nobel Prize winner in Literature 2020. The prize committee stressed “Her unmistakable poetic voice with plain beauty makes individual existence universal”. Childhood, family life, the close relationships with family is a theme that has remained central to her. She seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical themes.

Annie Ernaux (from France)

The Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 2022. She usually describes the events in her life and the lives of those around her. “The courage and clinical sensitivity with which she uncovers the roots, separations and collective restriction of personal memory” is the reason she was awarded the prize according to Swedish Academy.

It was Christmas Eve when my elder sister and decided to open our presents before our mom got home from work. She usually came home about an hour after we got home from school, which we thought was plenty of time to take a peek at the gifts under the tree.

My elder sister opened present after present while I was ordered to stand guard at the big window in our front room. Finally, when my sister’s curiosity was satisfied, we traded places.

After unwrapping a few presents, I found it faster to open one end of a present and peek inside. “Cool! Mom and Dad got me head phones for my stereo!” I pulled the headphones out of the box and was about to put them on when my sister shouted, “Quick! Wrap it back up! Mom’s coming!”

I put the headphones back hurriedly in the box but my hands were shaking. My heart pounded harder as I tried to get the tape to stick. I had just finished burying the package with my headphones in it when my mother came into the front room. I jumped up and said, “Hi, Mom!” She smiled at me and said “Hi” back, but didn’t appear to suspect a thing. My heart began to slow as I took a deep breath.

On Christmas morning, my sister and I smiled and gave award-winning performances when we opened our presents — again. “Headphones!” I shouted. “Thanks, it’s just what I wanted.” After everything had been opened, my sister and I looked at each other, and our eyes met. Our secret was safe, but somehow Christmas morning didn’t feel the same.

My sister and I never opened our Christmas presents early again. I don’t know if it was that opening our gifts for the second time just wasn’t as much fun as the first time, or if we came too close to getting caught and didn’t want to think about what our mother would have done to us.

Psychologists have long believed that personalities are relatively immune to changes following collective stressful events, such as natural disasters, but the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be an exception, said Angelina Sutin, a psychologist at Florida State University. Researchers from a new study analyzed answers from 7,109 adults in the United States, based on the Big Five personality traits: neuroticism (神经过敏), extroversion (外向), openness, agreeableness and dutifulness. The participants, aged 18 to 109, took multiple personality tests on their phones or computers measuring these traits before and during the pandemic.

In the first, “acute” phase from March 2020 to December 2020, personality traits remained fairly consistent with per-pandemic surveys, with only neuroticism slightly declining. By the second phase, defined as the “adaptation” period from January 2021 to February 2022, there were no overall shifts in neuroticism relative to per-pandemic levels, but adults had become less extroverted, open, agreeable and dutiful. Also, younger adults’ personalities changed the most, while the oldest group had no significant shifts. And no other age group saw an increase in neuroticism in the second phase, but adults under 30 did.

“The results don’t hold true tor each person. So its no surprise if you don’t see that same change in yourself or those closest to you,” Sutin said.

Although personality doesn’t directly control mental health, Sutin is advocating for more research into the impact that pandemic-related personality changes may have on well being, particularly for young adults. “We need to do what we can to help support younger adults as much as possible, so they can make better transitions into adulthood and reduce the stress that they face to help improve their mental health and long-term outcomes,” said Sutin.

Still, the study had a few downsides, said Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois Banana-Champaign. There was no control group of people who hadn’t experienced the pandemic, and other explanations weren’t explored, making it hard to assess if these personality changes were directly caused by the pandemic.