Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux was born Annie Duchesne in 1940 in Lillebonne, Normandy, and grew up in nearby Yvetot, where her parents ran a café-grocery in a working-class part of town. Education carried her away from that world: she studied at the universities of Rouen and Bordeaux, became a teacher, and spent much of her career at France’s national centre for distance learning, living from the mid-1970s in the new town of Cergy-Pontoise outside Paris.

She began with an autobiographical novel, Cleaned Out (1974), but soon abandoned fiction for something more exacting. A Man’s Place (1983), about her father, and A Woman’s Story (1987), about her mother, examine with deliberate plainness the class distance that education opened between parents and child. Further books dissect a passionate affair (Simple Passion), an illegal abortion in 1963 (Happening), her mother’s dementia and a childhood scene of violence at home (Shame). The Years (2008), her most ambitious work, recounts six decades of French life through an impersonal “we” and “she”, binding one woman’s memory to that of her generation. Her style, flat and precise by design, sits close to sociology and refuses both lyricism and self-pity.

The Years was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, bringing her a large English-speaking readership, and Audrey Diwan’s film of Happening won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2021. The Nobel Prize in 2022 recognised the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots and collective restraints of personal memory; she was the first Frenchwoman to receive it.