Annie ernaux

Since the publication of her first book, Cleaned Out, in 1974, Annie Ernaux’s writing has continued to explore not only her own life experience but also that of her generation, her parents, women, anonymous others encountered in public space, the forgotten. The main themes threaded through her work over more than four decades, are: the body and sexuality; intimate relationships; social inequality and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to write these life experiences. In Ernaux’s work the most personal, the most intimate experiences – whether of grieving, classed shame, nascent sexuality, passion, illegal abortion, illness, or the perception of time – are always understood as shared by others, and reflective of the social, political and cultural context in which they occur. Having published three autobiographical novels ( Cleaned Out, Do What They Say or Else and The Frozen Woman), Ernaux turned away from fiction with the publication of A Man’s Place. In this process she has invented narrative forms that constitute new directions in life writing: autosociobiographical texts, such as A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story and Shame explore her own life and that of her parents, but also the social milieu in which those lives evolved, while the collective autobiography, The Years, covers the social and cultural history of France since her birth in 1940 to 2007. Ernaux has also published diary extracts (‘ I remain in...

© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Monica Mileur What to read: Books by Annie Ernaux Interested in reading a book by 2022 literature laureate Ellen Mattson on Happening (L’Événement) I would happily recommend all Ernaux’s books, but a particular favourite is Happening ( L’Événement) from 2000. It is an account of the illegal abortion Ernaux underwent in the early 1960s, the circumstances leading up to it and its devastating consequences. Given the chance to higher education and to lift herself out of the working-class milieu where she grew up, the young Annie realises that she must end the pregnancy. She just does not know how to do it. She seeks medical advice, tries the old methods of knitting needles etc., asks around for an address and manages finally to locate a backstreet abortionist. What follows is a brutally realistic description of her ordeal, ending in a hospital where she nearly bleeds to death. But it is also a description of light, and alleviation, something near to ecstasy. It is as if this extreme situation and what she is going through connects her more strongly to life and to the future. This way of writing about something that has traditionally been considered shameful, low, and ugly makes L’Événement quite a remarkable book. Anders Olsson on A Man’s Place (La place) My choice is Annie Ernaux’s fourth book La place (1983), in English A Man’s Place. It was her literary breakthrough and has already become a classic in modern French letters. With this brief and...

The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, Annie Ernaux is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place. The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, Annie Ernaux is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place. “Naturally I feel no shame in writing these thing...

Annie Ernaux, née Duchesne, was born in 1940 in Lillebonne Normandy. A few years later her parents moved to Yvetot, where they kept a café and grocery shop in a working-class district of the town. She studied at a private Catholic secondary school in Yvetot, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time. In 1958, at eighteen, she left home for the summer to look after children in a summer camp ( colonie de vacances). Annie Ernaux in the 1960s Photo credit: L’Inventoire During that summer, living for the first time with a group of people of her own age, she had her first sexual experiences, recounted in her recent work Mémoire de fille ( A Girl’s Story). In this same book, she also writes about her stay in London as an au pair in 1960, and her first attempt at Higher Education which took the form of primary teacher training in Rouen. At the end of the book we see Annie returning to Rouen from London to take a degree in literature, having abandoned her primary school teacher training course. She had also already written the first pages of her first, unpublished novel in London. The years that followed saw her married with two sons, qualifying as a secondary school teacher in two competitive examinations, the Capès and the still more prestigious agrégation, and teaching French in a secondary school in Annecy, Haute Savoie. One of her rare returns to Normandy coincided with her father’s ...

“I don’t feel particularly like another woman,” Annie Ernaux said, on a recent afternoon, when she was asked what it was like to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Does winning a prize— the prize—turn you into someone else? In the minds of others it does. Although Ernaux has never been preoccupied with her Nobel odds, she has long been considered a contender by those who delight in speculating about which of the world’s writers the Swedes will crown next. Last year, at Nobel time, Ernaux left her home in the Paris suburb of Cergy for a physical-therapy appointment and found herself barraged by journalists who had camped out in front of her gate, “just in case.” The day before this year’s announcement, people at Gallimard, her French publisher, warned her not to go out or answer the phone the next morning. She obliged, even when she saw a Swedish number popping up repeatedly on her caller I.D. (“A bad joke,” she assumed. She has been hoaxed in the past.) A few minutes after one in the afternoon, she turned on the transistor radio in her kitchen and heard her own name. “It was perfectly unreal,” Ernaux said. She was alone with her cats. Six days later, I met Ernaux in the handsome Tribeca loft of Daniel Simon, the head of her American publisher, Seven Stories Press. At eighty-two, she is still tall (thanks to genetics) and blond (by choice). She had paired her sober black trousers and shoes with splashes of color: a scarf the green of Giverny in summertime, a fuchsia blouse....

Ernaux is the first French writer to win the Nobel since Patrick Modiano in 2014. She becomes the 16th French writer to have won the Nobel to date. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, said that in her work, “Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class”. Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy. She studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Olsson said her “path to authorship was long and arduous”. Her debut was Les armoires vides, published in 1974 in France and as Cleaned Out in English in 1990. It was her fourth book, La place or A Man’s Place, that was her literary breakthrough. A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, which was originally published in 1988 in French, have become contemporary classics in France. Ernaux won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008 for her autobiography The Years, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize in 2019 when it was translated into English by Alison L Strayer. Chakraborty wrote: “The quality that distinguishes Ernaux’s writing on sex from others in her milieu is the total absence of shame. Desire in her brings forth more desire, the impulse of death, happiness, and even past trauma, like her abortion, but never humiliation. Reading her is to thoroughly purge yourself of the n...

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F or once, the rumours have proved true. The Swedish Academy is famous for its secrecy and its often apparently obscure choices. The October announcement frequently has journalists and editors frantically Googling that year’s recipient – and perhaps a decade ago, Annie Ernaux might have received the same treatment. But, while her work has been well known and well received in France since the 1970s, and published in English translation from 1991, it is only since around 2019, when The Years, her monumental work of fiction-memoir was 01:15 2022 Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux: 'I feel I have a new responsibility' – video The book, which ends in 2006, was celebrated in France as a modern In Search of Lost Time. In terms of prose style, however, Ernaux has little in common with the more flamboyant Proust – her writing is more austere, the sensuality more analytical. Her work as a whole is reflective, intimate – but also impersonal and detached. The Nobel committee described her oeuvre on Thursday as “uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.” Nowhere is uncompromising style more apparent than in Ernaux’s account of the illegal abortion she had in 1963 as a student in Rouen. This episode of her life, which first appeared as the short, sharp book Happening in France in 1999, was crafted – like much of Ernaux’s work – from the diaries she kept at the time. Her family was solidly religious, and Ernaux was the first to attend university. Matter-of-factly she stat...