the guy in a cinema ad for Paic Vaisselle dishwashing liquid, cheerfully breaking dirty dishes instead of washing them while an offscreen voice sternly intoned ‘That is not the solution!’ and the man, gazing at the audience in despair, asked ‘But what is the solution?’ Born in 1940, ANNIE ERNAUX grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and began teaching high school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance. One of France’s most esteemed living writers, her books have been subject to much critical acclaim. She won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place when it was first published in French in 1984. The English edition was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The English edition of A Woman's Story was a New York Times Notable Book. The films of the Official Selection 2020". Cannes Film Festival. 3 June 2020. Archived from the original on 4 June 2020 . Retrieved 7 October 2022. a b c Bushby, Helen (6 October 2022). "Annie Ernaux: French writer wins Nobel Prize in Literature". BBC News. Archived from the original on 6 October 2022 . Retrieved 6 October 2022.

Prix Marguerite Yourcenar, awarded by the Civil Society of Multimedia Authors, for the entirety of her oeuvre [56] Agency, Hands. "Mémoire de fille". Mémoire de fille. Archived from the original on 7 October 2022 . Retrieved 7 October 2022. Annie Ernaux receiving the 2022 Nobel prize in literature from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images The willingness to take risks both in memory and writing, without seeking other people’s reassurance or approval, sets Ernaux apart from her peers. A Girl’s Story (first published in 2016, translated in 2020) was a narrative of the sexual abuse and trauma Ernaux suffered as a teenager from a male supervisor at a summer camp in Normandy in the 1950s and sparked debates about consent in France, before the watershed moment of #balancetonporc, or #MeToo. In contrast, The Young Man is a book about sexual empowerment, of coming into one’s own as a sexual subject and enjoying the maturity that brings. “Absolutely,” she replies, “and not at all about submission.”

Ce qu'ils disent ou rien, Paris: Gallimard, 1977; French & European Publications, Incorporated, 1989, ISBN 978-0-7859-2655-9 The Yearsis a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions of past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades. The Years is an autobiography — told from a third-person point of view — of author Annie Ernaux. It takes readers through nearly six decades of the author's life, starting in 1941 and ending in 2006. Despite the lengthy-time period the novel covers, it has no chapter structure nor a table of contents. The novel is told chronologically, but with no other dividing or organizational structure. And so it is throughout her story -- which is a story of how memory shifts and fades, the significance of past events weakening even as some remain bright and vivid in our minds, and sometimes the unexpected and/or seemingly incidental making the longest-lasting impression. The technique is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. She illuminates a person through the culture that poured through her; it’s about time and being situated in a certain place in history and how time and place make a person. It’s incredible.’

A Woman's Story ( Une femme), A Man's Place, and Simple Passion were recognised as The New York Times Notable Books, [21] and A Woman's Story was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. [22] Shame was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, [23] I Remain in Darkness a Top Memoir of 1999 by The Washington Post, and The Possession was listed as a Top Ten Book of 2008 by More magazine. [24] It won the 2008 Françoise-Mauriac Prize of the Académie française, the 2008 Marguerite Duras Prize, [6] the 2008 French Language Prize, the 2009 Télégramme Readers Prize, and the 2016 Premio Strega Europeo Prize. Translated by Alison L. Strayer, The Years was a Finalist for the 31st Annual French-American Foundation Translation Prize. There are many things Ernaux does well, but she is unparalleled on desire and love: the full-bodied joy, but also the brutal lows of it. Simple Passion is a sliver of a book that captures the freefall of obsessive love and the manic, mangled why-doesn’t-he-call? time shifts of an affair. Ernaux is superb on the power dynamics and inequality of some relationships. Annie Ernaux is ruthless. I mean that as a compliment. Perhaps no other memoirist– if, in fact, memoir-writing is what Ernaux is up to, which both is and isn’t the case– is so willing to interrogate not only the details of her life but also the slippery question of identity. … Think of The Years… as memoir in the shape of intervention: ‘all the things she has buried as shameful and which are now worthy of retrieval, unfolding, in the light of intelligence.'”For once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature – only the 17th woman out 119 laureates in the award’s history. Annie Ernaux was born in Seine-Maritime, France, in September 1940. In October 2022 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The famously private Ferrante does not call her work autofiction but tacitly admits that the friendship between Lila and Lenu, the protagonists of her Neapolitan novels, is based on an intense childhood friendship of her own. Like Ernaux, one of Ferrante’s chief concerns is history with a capital H: she places the grinding poverty, misogyny and organised crime of the era centre stage.