Annie Ernaux (1940 – )

Her work, based on fragments of her own life, was awarded the 2022 Literature Nobel Prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory.” She has defined her writing as a political act, and she has characterized her own language as “brutally direct, working-class and sometimes obscene.”

The books of Annie Ernaux, while short and stoical, are also raw and powerful. Her writing transforms her own life experiences – often painful, humiliating, shaming events – into universal emotions by the use of ruthlessly honest texts. She can even be described as an “ethnologist of herself”, as her writings shift between fiction, sociology, and history. As her literary work functions as a scrutiny of disparities regarding gender, language, and class, it also reflects the social and cultural evolution of France since the 40s.

Ernaux’s debut novel was 'Cleaned Out' (1990). In 'The Years' (2008) she writes about her lower-class youth in postwar France, as the daughter of two grocers. This work is considered her most ambitious project. Another remarkable book is 'Happening' (2001), in which she relates an illegal abortion she had in 1963. This book was adapted into a film in 2021. One of her most popular and striking works is 'Simple Passion' (1991). A perfect choice to comprehend her writing, 'Simple Passion' narrates Ernaux’s affair with a married Soviet diplomat between 1988 and 1990. It is a heartbreaking account of lust and obsession that she also tells in more detail in her most recent work, 'Getting Lost' (2022).

Other important works are 'A Man’s Place' (1983), a portrait of her father and the entire social milieu that had formed him; 'Shame' (1998), which can be considered a continuation of A 'Man’s Place' since Ernaux attempt to explain the sudden rage of the father against her mother at one particular moment in the past; and 'The Possession' (2008), a dissection of romantic love and its social mythology.