Annie ernaux books in english
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‘If it’s not a risk… it’s nothing’: Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux on her unapologetic career
When Annie Ernaux opens the front door to me at her home in Cergy, 40 minutes outside Paris, she immediately bursts out laughing. The source of her hilarity is my extensive baggage, which I’ve dragged from London on an early Eurostar. “Don’t worry,” I say, mortified, “I’m not planning to move in”, which causes more chuckles. Ernaux has a laugh that is delicate and raucous, generous and earthy. She laughs with and not at.
Ernaux is the first French woman to win the Nobel prize in literature. Her work exposes, without sentimentality or sensationalism, acute social inequality in France, especially as it affects women and working-class people. Her books, written mainly in the first person in a deceptively straightforward style, have, since the early 1970s, created a deep intimacy with her readers, piercing the inflated egos of literary publishing and dissecting experiences as mundane and exceptional as unhappy marriages; passionate affairs; caring for ageing parents; being diagnosed with
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Since the publication of her first book, Cleaned Out, in 1974, Annie Ernaux’s writing has continued to explore not only her own life experience but also that of her generation, her parents, women, anonymous others encountered in public space, the forgotten. The main themes threaded through her work over more than four decades, are: the body and sexuality; intimate relationships; social inequality and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to write these life experiences. In Ernaux’s work the most personal, the most intimate experiences – whether of grieving, classed shame, nascent sexuality, passion, illegal abortion, illness, or the perception of time – are always understood as shared by others, and reflective of the social, political and cultural context in which they occur.
Having published three autobiographical novels (Cleaned Out, Do What They Say or Else and The Frozen Woman), Ernaux turned away from fiction with the publication of A Man’s Place. In this process she has invented narr
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Annie Ernaux
French writer (born 1940)
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".[1][2] Her literary work, mostly autobiographical, maintains close links with sociology.[3]
Early life and education
Ernaux was born in Lillebonne in Normandy, France, and grew up in nearby Yvetot,[4] where her parents, Blanche (Dumenil) and Alphonse Duchesne,[5] ran a café and grocery in a working-class part of town.[6][7] 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).[7] 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 liter
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