Annie Ernaux

Ernaux's books chronicle events in her life and the lives of those around her, including unsparing accounts of sex, illness and her parents' deaths.

[“The Years,”](https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-annie-ernaux-20180118-story.html) published in 2008, which described herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the present day. [was awarded Wednesday](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-10-05/nobel-chemistry-prize) to Californians Carolyn R. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally.” [2 Californians among trio who share Nobel Prize in chemistry for devising ‘molecular Lego’](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-10-05/nobel-chemistry-prize) The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. Ernaux is the first female French Nobel literature winner and just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.” The prizes will be handed out Dec. The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity” of books Her first book was “Cleaned Out” in 1974. “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. “And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking.

The Swedish Academy said that it had awarded Ernaux the prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and ...

A 2018 translation of her memoir [“The Years”](https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/embed?asin=B07D56SBCM&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_QY22B5XHQTY55NZPVW8P&tag=thewaspos09-20) was [shortlisted](https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-years) for the Booker Prize. [Abdulrazak Gurnah](https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/23/nobel-winner-abdulrazak-gurnah-afterlives/?itid=lk_inline_manual_23), a Tanzanian-born novelist who writes primarily in English. [“I Remain in Darkness,”](https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/embed?asin=B07WMZSLLQ&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_5HE0SET8XRBERH26GJWY&tag=thewaspos09-20) Ernaux chronicled her mother’s decline under the effect of Alzheimer’s. In response to an audience question at this year’s announcement about the Nobel Prize’s general focus on European writers, Olsson said, “We have many different criteria, and you cannot satisfy all of them.” Stressing again that literary quality was most important to the committee, he went on, “One year, we gave the prize to a non-European writer, last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah. [kept secret for 50 years](https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/literature/), can be submitted by members of the academy and its peer institutions, literature and linguistics professors, previous laureates, and the presidents of national literary societies. Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot directed “The Super 8 Years,” a 60-minute film composed of old home movies that she is to present at the New York Film Festival next week. [born](https://www.annie-ernaux.org/biography/) in 1940 in Normandy, the daughter of working-class parents. After reviewing and discussing the works of the nominees on that list, the academy selects a winner in October. Instead, at her best, Ernaux has the ability to refine ordinary experience, stripping it of irrelevancy and digression and reducing it to a kind of iconography of the late-20th-century soul.” John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said in a statement: “As a great admirer of Annie Ernaux’s extraordinary work, it is a particular pleasure for me to see her receive this global recognition. A translation of Ernaux’s [“Getting Lost,”](https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B09N6S2QHP&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_A7EN738616G6GHRK0TV2&tag=thewaspos09-20) a diary of her affair with a younger, married man, was published this year. [“Happening”](https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/embed?asin=B00541ZWVC&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_VRREX561XQ6ZFG25X6ZD&tag=thewaspos09-20) discusses an illegal abortion that she had in the 1960s.

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.

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.

STOCKHOLM -- French author Annie Ernaux, who has fearlessly mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, won this year's Nobel Prize ...

Described by Olsson as “the first collective autobiography,” it depicted Ernaux herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century. The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895. Two more autobiographical novels followed – "Ce qu’ils disent ou rien" (“What They Say Goes”) and "La femme gelée" (“The Frozen Woman”) – before she moved to more overtly autobiographical books. “My work is political," she said at the news conference. Its English translation was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2019. Last year’s prize winner, Tanzanian-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Dan Simon, Ernaux's longtime American publisher at Seven Stories Press, said that in the early years, “she insisted that we not categorize her books at all. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.” Ernaux's books present uncompromising portraits of life's most intimate moments, including sexual encounters, illness and the deaths of her parents. Ernaux's first book, “Cleaned Out,” was about her own illegal abortion before it was legalized in France. “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. "And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking.

Ernaux, 82, has written a number of celebrated novels, many of which are autobiographical. Her first book, "Les armoires vides," was published in French in 1974 ...

"Because in 1963, 1964 when it happened to me, it was unthinkable to imagine abortion would one day be authorised, doctors wouldn't even say the word." Her first book, "Les armoires vides," was published in French in 1974, and in English as "Cleaned Out" in 1990. Ernaux was born in a rural village in Normandy, northern France, in 1940 to parents who owned a store and cafe.

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 Nobel Prize in literature for 2022 was awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, ...

[Things Seen](https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803210776/), of which it said, “Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where ‘things seen’ reflect a private life meeting the larger world. “As the novel progresses, and Anne’s feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters evolve, she grows into a more mature but also more conflicted and unhappy character, leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years. The story, which takes place during the summer and fall of Anne’s transition from middle school to high school, is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style from her point of view. Ernaux captures Anne’s adolescent voice, through which she expresses her keen observations in a highly colloquial style,” said the press’s description of the novel. “Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the novel tells the story of a 15-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. Her setting was poor but ambitious, with parents who had pulled themselves up from proletarian survival to a bourgeois life, where the memories of beaten earth floors never disappeared but where politics was seldom broached.

Annie Ernaux, the French writer known for her autobiographical novels and nonfiction works, has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature.

[Salman Rushdie](https://www.vulture.com/2022/08/salman-rushdie-recovering-after-stabbing.html) would be awarded the honor following his attack in August. [awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/06/books/nobel-prize-literature?partner=slack&smid=sl-share). Born in France in 1940, Ernaux published her first book, [Cleaned Out](https://www.vulture.com/2022/05/where-does-the-abortion-thriller-go-from-here.html), in 1974.

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.

PARIS (AP) — French author Annie Ernaux, who has fearlessly mined her experiences as a working-class woman to explore life in France since the 1940s, ...

Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal](https://apnews.com/article/science-health-stockholm-chemistry-fd3521c6436c94fd6dd73f4e53d86d09) for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs to target cancer and other diseases. “My work is political,” she said at the news conference. [A week of Nobel Prize announcements](https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-salman-rushdie-science-entertainment-health-0f1485cd7e7a3beb23731e2e38176c9b) kicked off Monday with Swedish scientist [Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine](https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-science-health-stockholm-5cfe18038fc4fcda06d38323f7333c69) for unlocking secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system. Described by Olsson as “the first collective autobiography,” it depicted Ernaux herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century. The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895. Two more autobiographical novels followed – “Ce qu’ils disent ou rien” (“What They Say Goes”) and “La femme gelée” (“The Frozen Woman”) – before she moved to more overtly autobiographical books. Its English translation was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2019. Dan Simon, Ernaux’s longtime American publisher at Seven Stories Press, said that in the early years, “she insisted that we not categorize her books at all. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.” Ernaux’s first book, “Cleaned Out,” was about her own illegal abortion before it was legalized in France. “And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking. “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.

STOCKHOLM (AP) — French author Annie Ernaux, who has fearlessly mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, won this year's Nobel ...

Her most critically acclaimed book is “The Years,” published in 2008, which described herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal](https://apnews.com/article/science-health-stockholm-chemistry-fd3521c6436c94fd6dd73f4e53d86d09) for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895. Ernaux is the first female French Nobel literature winner and just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes. Last year’s prize winner, Tanzanian-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.” Her first book was “Cleaned Out” in 1974. “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. “And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking. While Macron praised Ernaux for her Nobel, she has been unsparing with him.

Yes, awarding the Nobel Prize in literature to Ernaux, a chronicler of illegal abortion, is a political move. But it's also a victory for literature.

“I shall never hear the sound of her voice again,” she writes in the closing paragraph of “A Woman’s Story.” “It was her voice, together with her words, her hands, and her way of moving and laughing which linked the woman I am to the child I once was. In “The Years” (2008), Ernaux addresses the issue head on, seeking out “a language no one knows.” The solution she enacts explodes our preconceptions of voice and person, sliding between the singular and plural, using pronouns such as “we” and “she” while eschewing the memoir’s defining posture: “I.” One of the ways Ernaux develops this book is to circle back, more than once, to the opening sentence, using it as a kind of echo that punctuates the narrative. Both “A Woman’s Story” and its companion volume “A Man’s Place” (1983) represent cases in point. Such a move highlights not only the immediacy of writing as an act but also the emotions Ernaux can’t resolve. “It was only the day before yesterday that I overcame the fear of writing ‘My mother died’ on a blank sheet of paper, not as the first line of a letter but as the opening of a book.” [As I once wrote](https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-annie-ernaux-20180118-story.html) in these pages, Ernaux is ruthless, which is the highest praise I have to give. In more than 20 books, 15 of which have been translated into English, she has [effectively deconstructed](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-21-et-secondulin21-story.html) not just the memoir as a form but also the very question of memory and identity. At the same time, and as much as I support that intention, the choice of Ernaux as this year’s laureate is a victory for literature. She is not interested in taking narrative at face value or using it to blur or soften; there is not a sentimental sentence in her oeuvre. “Trace it all back,” she writes in “Cleaned Out,” “call it all up, fit it all together, an assembly line, one thing after another. I use the word reminiscence rather than memoir for a reason; Ernaux also resists the simplification of form.