Annie Ernaux

Writer, 82, is best known for works exploring female sexuality and the lives of women.

French author Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for "the courage and clinical acuity" in her largely autobiographical books ...

Former French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot wrote on Twitter that Ernaux is "a writer who has put the autobiographical mode in its cold analytical way at the heart of her career. "She's been a very important contributor in terms of memoir and autobiographical work," Whittaker told Reuters. Readers in France said they'd been waiting for Ernaux to win. "I did not imagine at the time that 22 years later, the right to abortion would be challenged," Ernaux told reporters in Paris. "It's a long path that she makes in her life," Swedish Academy member Anders Olsson told Reuters. She has previously said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes to social inequality.

Writer and critic Catherine Taylor explains how the French writer became the 'great chronicler to a generation' • Annie Ernaux wins the 2022 Nobel prize in ...

Margaret Drabble has commented that “Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation” – now the great chronicler been justly rewarded with the greatest of literature prizes. (She would go on to teach in schools and university, from 1977-2000, alongside writing books.) A Man’s Place is very much part of what Ernaux calls the “lived dimension of history” – it is dispassionate about the life of a working-class man of his time, a struggling grocer with minimal education: “no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony,” she warns us. Nowhere is uncompromising style more apparent than in Ernaux’s account of the illegal abortion she had in 1963 as a student in Rouen. Her work as a whole is reflective, intimate – but also impersonal and detached. [shortlisted for the International Booker prize](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/09/man-booker-international-shortlist-dominated-by-women-authors-and-translators-olga-tokarczuk-annie-ernaux), that Ernaux has made a big impact on the anglophone world. 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.

She is known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender. Read more at straitstimes.com.

I look inside a memory,” she once said. “It is a great responsibility… “I was so ashamed for Deneuve,” Ernaux said, describing her comments as “the reflection of a group of privileged women”. Ernaux said her decision to keep a day job was due to her fear of losing everything – a worry rooted in the working-class struggles of her youth – and also the desire to keep her writing free from financial obligations. “I was very surprised… She was honoured “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

The French writer, who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, blurs the line between fiction and memoir with spare prose she has characterized as ...

[Happening](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/books/the-thing.html)” is an account of a back-alley abortion she had in 1963. To be in the pure immanence of a moment.” “ [A Girl’s Story](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/books/review/schrodingers-dog-martin-dumont-girls-story-annie-ernaux-finding-dora-maar-brigitte-benkemoun.html?searchResultPosition=4)” describes an adolescence shaped by a difficult sexual encounter and an eating disorder, and contrasts that with her sense of herself in her 70s. “There is absolutely no reason at all to hold back.” “The world is made to be pounced on and enjoyed,” she has written. Ernaux writes as if she’s walked quietly onstage with a guitar and a tiny, crackling amp, which she plugs in and proceeds, like P.J. To be there at that very instant, without spilling over into the before or after. Ernaux, 82, is the author of 20 or so works of fiction and memoir. Each looks out levelly at the world; each derives maximum effect from a minimum of words. The book’s tone is thin, bare and chapped, I wrote in my review of it, as if broadcast in mono instead of stereo, in the best sense. English-language readers have, in recent years, been racing to catch up. [who won the Nobel in 2020,](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/books/louise-gluck-nobel-prize-literature.html) hers is a voice of rough compassion.

The French author of mostly autobiographical work takes the prestigious books prize for the 'courage and clinical acuity' of her writing.

Previous winners include Bob Dylan, cited for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, and Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. Testard said Ernaux’s “literary project has been to write about her life and to get at the truth of it somehow … “Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean,” he continued. Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy. Reading her is to thoroughly purge yourself of the notion that shame could be a possible outcome of wanting sex.” Ernaux is the first French writer to win the Nobel since Patrick Modiano in 2014.

In her books the French author transmutes the private and the ordinary into something profound | Culture.

In Ms Ernaux’s hands, the supermarket trolley may become a vehicle of history. “A Woman’s Story” (1987), a searing account of her mother’s life and death from Alzheimer’s, helped secure her reputation in France. Translated by Alison Strayer, it won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in 2019 (of which your correspondent was a judge): to date, one of Ms Ernaux’s few honours in the Anglosphere. “I believe that desire, frustration and social and cultural inequality are reflected in the way we examine the contents of our shopping trolley or in the words we use to order a cut of beef,” she has said. Her book of 2016, “A Girl’s Story”, is typical of the French writer’s approach. Decades later, she returns to the city for a literary event; while her fellow delegates consume culture, she takes the Tube and plunges “back into my past life”.

The French author is the 17th woman to win the prize.

[The Years](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/556070/the-years-by-annie-ernaux/). Her breakthrough into the mainstream came with her fourth book, [A Man’s Place](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55507230-a-man-s-place). Last year, the book was adapted as a [feature-length film](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13880104/). The Swedish Academy has been criticized over the years for failing to recognize a diverse range of writers: Including Ermaux, 96 of the past 119 Nobel literature laureates have been either European or North American. The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, which is almost $900,000. She joins over a dozen French writers who have been honored with the award. But publishers rejected it for being “too ambitious,” she told the [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/books/annie-ernaux-a-girls-story.html)’ Laura Cappelle in 2020. “She writes about things that no one else writes about, for instance her abortion, her jealousy, her experiences as an abandoned lover and so forth. For years, the literary community has regarded Ernaux as a favorite for the accolade, which is awarded to an author for their entire body of work and is widely considered to be the greatest honor a writer can achieve. reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.” She found out when she heard the news on the radio, and stepped outside of her suburban Paris home to speak briefly with reporters on Thursday afternoon, reports Her work is lauded for its blistering honesty; the author has recounted her first sexual experiences, an illegal abortion, a passionate extramarital affair and the death of her parents, among other things.

French writer Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the panel said was an "uncompromising" 40-year body of work exploring "a life ...

It was turned into a film that For this purpose she uses language as “a knife”, as she calls it, to tear apart the veils of imagination. [wrote in 2020](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/a-memoirist-who-mistrusts-her-own-memories) that over her 20 books, "she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life". That would later feed into her novels. [#NobelPrize]laureate in literature Annie Ernaux has said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes for social inequality. Her parents ran a café and grocery shop, and when she encountered girls from middle-class backgrounds, she experienced the "shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time,"

Ernaux's novel Happening inspired Audrey Diwan's Venice Lion-winning title of the same name.

Ernaux’s debut novel was 1974 title Les Armoires Vides (Cleaned Out) but she gained international recognition following the publication of her 2008 book Les Années (The Years) that looked at both her personal life and French society at large from the end of World War II to the 21st century and won several awards and honours. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.” The film takes

The French writer has won the Nobel for literature for her ascetic approach to writing and fearlessness in covering the personal and taboo.

[The Years](https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-years), is considered to be her magnum opus. Her courage in exploring and exploding generic expectations is also reflected in the content of her work. Her protagonist is a woman who, like so many of Ernaux’s readers, identifies as a “ [class defector](https://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Folio/Folio/L-ecriture-comme-un-couteau)”. [familiarity, a subtle complicity](https://www.persee.fr/doc/polix_0295-2319_1991_num_4_14_1454)” as her teachers avidly listened to the stories of her middle-class schoolmates but silenced her attempts to speak about her home life. [I Remain in Darkness](https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/i-remain-in-darkness) was written during her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. Ernaux believes that writing about the self inevitably involves writing about a socio-political context, and thereby extends the representativeness of her own experience. She is the only daughter of working-class parents who ran a cafe-cum-grocers, and her childhood was underpinned by class tensions within the family home and outside it. This experience gave Ernaux knowledge of French theories and practices of writing, which is evident in her references to authors such as Honore de Balzac, Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir and her self-reflexive comments on the act of writing. Of the 119 awarded, Ernaux is only the 18th woman Nobel laureate in literature and the first French woman to have won the prize. It was at school that she became aware of a “ She then studied literature at Rouen university and went on to teach it at secondary school before becoming a full-time writer in the 1970s. She has continued to surprise and inspire readers with coverage of daring topics and her innovative approach to genres.

The French author's Nobel Prize win represents a great moment for memoir, for women, and for the precise use of language in the service of emotional truth.

The first in her family to receive an advanced education, she worked for years as a teacher of literature, eventually becoming part of the French national correspondence school CNED. Born in 1940, she grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, the daughter of a farm boy and a factory worker who both left school at 12 and who came far enough up in the world to run a provincial café and general store. She is the author of more than 20 books, most of them relatively brief accounts drawn from her memories of a life—which doesn’t immediately strike one as the stuff of literature, but that’s where Ernaux, once again, proves us wrong.

Editorial: One of France's finest writers has joined an all too select bunch of female laureates. And about time too.

Though it would be unwise to overclaim the significance of her win, it suggests that the notion of “an ideal direction” may just be shifting. The rubric of the Nobel prize calls for “outstanding work in an ideal direction”. [Olga Tokarczuk](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/20/olga-tokarczuk-interview-flights-man-booker-international). Her work is part of a European tradition of autofiction that has since produced Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård and her young compatriot Édouard Louis. Far from being a writer of the me-me-me school, her gift to literature has been to find the collective in the particular. Her unstinting recreations of her own experience, from working-class origins, have faced down many of the big taboos, from sexual desire and illegal abortion to cancer and dementia.