Annie Ernaux

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008
The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos,...

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
"Happening recounts what it was like to be a young woman whose life changed — and world ominously narrowed — in 1963 with an unwanted pregnancy. . . . It feels urgently of the moment."
—The New York Times
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her...

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
A New York Times Notable Book
Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection.
Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation...

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
Annie Ernaux's most recent book, dazzling and breathtaking, published in France in 2022, is about her affair with a man 30 years her junior.
“A sublime book.” —Elle
“Once again the work of the writer Annie Ernaux appears as both a rigorous study of life and an experiment. These fragments of living, however evanescent, are precious, irreplaceable, like a skin that...

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat
Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her...

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter’s attachment to her mother, and of both women’s strength and resiliency. I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie’s attempts first to help her mother recover from Alzheimer’s disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman’s gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter...

"Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions 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 of diaries. Local dialect,...

""J'écrirai por venger ma race". It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defense of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 2022. To write of her own life, she asserts, is to "shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed;" to mine individual experience...

Normandy, France, 1970s. Anne is transitioning from middle school to high school. She expresses her feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters, growing more mature but also conflicted and unhappy. In leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years, Anne must navigate the often-confusing signals she receives from boys, while also moving further away from her parents as she surpasses their educational level and worldview.--...

A revelatory meditation on class and consumer culture, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux "A dryly charming look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler."-Kirkus Reviews For half a century, the French writer Annie Ernaux has transgressed the boundaries of what stories are considered worth telling, what subjects worth exploring. In this probing meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon...