Annie Ernaux

Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux (French: [ɛʁno]; née Duchesne [dyʃɛn]; born 1 September 1940) is a French writer who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory". Her literary work, mostly autobiographical, maintains close links with sociology.
Ernaux was born in Lillebonne in Normandy, France, and grew up in nearby Yvetot, where her parents, Blanche (Dumenil) and Alphonse Duchesne, ran a café and grocery in a working-class part of town. In 1960, she travelled to London, England, where she worked as an au pair, an experience she would later relate in 2016's Mémoire de fille (A Girl's Story). Upon returning to France, she studied at the universities of Rouen and then Bordeaux, qualified as a schoolteacher, and earned a higher degree in modern literature in 1971. She worked for a time on a thesis project, unfinished, on Pierre de Marivaux.
In the early 1970s, Ernaux taught at a lycée in Bonneville, Haute-Savoie, at the college of Évire in Annecy-le-Vieux, then in Pontoise, before joining the National Centre for Distance Education, where she was employed for 23 years.
Ernaux started her literary career in 1974 with Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out), an autobiographical novel. In 1984, she won the Renaudot Prize for another of her works La Place (A Man's Place), an autobiographical narrative focusing on her relationship with her father and her experiences growing up in a small town in France, and her subsequent process of moving into adulthood and away from her parents' place and her class of origin.
Early in her career, Ernaux turned from fiction to focus on autobiography. Her work combines historic and individual experiences. She charts her parents' social progression (La Place, La Honte), her teenage years (Ce qu'ils disent ou rien), her marriage (La Femme gelée), her passionate affair with an Eastern European man (Passion simple), her abortion (L'Événement), Alzheimer's disease (Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit), the death of her mother (Une femme), and breast cancer (L'usage de la photo). Ernaux also wrote L'écriture comme un couteau (Writing as Sharp as a Knife) with Frédéric-Yves Jeannet.
A Woman's Story (Une femme), A Man's Place, and Simple Passion were recognised as The New York Times Notable Books, and A Woman's Story was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Shame was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, 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.
Ernaux's 2008 historical memoir Les Années (The Years), well received by French critics, is considered by many to be her magnum opus. In this book, Ernaux writes about herself in the third person ('elle', or 'she' in English) for the first time, providing a vivid look at French society just after the Second World War until the early 2000s. It is the story of a woman and of the evolving society she lived in. The Years won the 2008 Prix François-Mauriac de la région Aquitaine [fr], the 2008 Marguerite Duras Prize, the 2008 Prix de la langue française, the 2009 Télégramme Readers Prize, and the 2016 Strega European Prize. Translated by Alison L. Strayer, The Years was a finalist for the 31st Annual French-American Foundation Translation Prize, was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019, and won the 2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her popularity in anglophone countries increased sharply after The Years was shortlisted for the International Booker.
On 6 October 2022, it was announced that Ernaux would be awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory". Ernaux is the 16th French writer, and the first Frenchwoman, to receive the literature prize. In congratulating her, the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, said that she was the voice "of the freedom of women and of the forgotten".
Many of Ernaux's works have been translated into English and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Seven Stories Press. Ernaux is one of the seven founding authors from whom the latter Press takes its name.
Ernaux supported Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2012 French presidential election. In 2018, she expressed her support for the yellow vests protests.
Ernaux has repeatedly indicated her support for the BDS movement, a Palestinian-led campaign promoting boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. In 2018, the author signed a letter alongside about 80 other artists that opposed the holding of the Israel–France cross-cultural season by the Israeli and French governments. In 2019, Ernaux signed a letter calling on a French state-owned broadcasting network not to air the Eurovision Song Contest, which was held in Israel that year. In 2021, after the Operation Guardian of the Walls, she signed another letter that called Israel an apartheid state, claiming that "To frame this as a war between two equal sides is false and misleading. Israel is the colonizing power. Palestine is colonized." In October 2024, Ernaux signed an open letter alongside several thousand authors pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions.
Ernaux signed a letter that supported the release of Georges Abdallah, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1982 for the assassination of an American military attaché, Lt. Col. Charles R. Ray, and an Israeli diplomat, Yacov Barsimantov. According to the letter, the victims were "active Mossad and CIA agents, while Abdallah fought for the Palestinian people and against colonization".
Following the announcement of the award of the Nobel Prize, Ernaux showed solidarity with people's uprising in Iran against their government. The protests that followed the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, a young woman in the custody of Guidance Patrol (Morality Police) initially started against compulsory hijab law in Iran but soon took a broader focus on liberty. Ernaux said in an interview she was "absolutely in favour of women revolting against this absolute constraint".
Ernaux was previously married to Philippe Ernaux, with whom she has two sons, Éric (born in 1964) and David (born in 1968). The couple divorced in 1981.
She has been a resident of Cergy-Pontoise, a new town in the Paris suburbs, since the mid-1970s.
In addition to numerous theatrical and radio adaptations, Ernaux's novels have been adapted for the cinema on three occasions:
The Prix Annie-Ernaux, of which she is the "godmother", bears her name.