Annie Ernaux, one of the most important figures on the contemporary literary scene, received the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday October 6th. The 82-year-old writer will be rewarded for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory,” said the Nobel jury.
The novelist is the 17th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and the 16th French winner since the famed award was created in 1901.
With a work that feeds on the story of her own life, on an emancipation that is as intimate as it is social, the novelist has become the “intellectual reference” for a whole generation that came to feminism in the wake of the #MeToo movement.” emphasizes the newspaper Courrier international “In her work she constantly explores the experience of a life marked by major differences in terms of gender, language and class,” emphasized academic Anders Olsson.
Born Annie Duchesne on September 1, 1940 in Lillebonne (Seine-Maritime), she grew up in Yvetot in Normandy and came from a humble background. His parents, workers, became traders after buying the cafe-grocery store in the village. After studying literature at the University of Rouen and then in Bordeaux, which led her to aggregation, she taught in Annecy in the early 1970s.
The novelist drew the material for her books from her own life, building a literary work brick by brick, bearing witness to her origins, the shame associated with it, her desire for exploitation and all the feelings that accompany social advancement, and made herself so noticeably a work of sociology. Through an essentially autobiographical body of work, Annie Ernaux has charted the inner cartography of a woman and the wider French society since the post-war period.
She has also explored in her novels the question of the feminine condition, that of a woman born during the war and coming of age in the 1960s, a whole life captured in a body of work that is both intimate and universal. She told of childhood, adolescence and youth in Les Armoires vides (1974) or in What They Say or Nothing (1977); in La Place (1983) or La Honte (1997) she talked about her family, her parents and her social emancipation.
“I’m not an exhibitionist. I’m not self-centered, even if I’ve been criticized for it. I think I’ve always spoken of myself in a distance, as if I was the site of an experience that I was restoring. I’m talking about myself because I still know this topic best… I’m interested in what may be socially stored in me and in everyone else.”
Annie Ernaux
in Le Monde newspaper, April 2017
In La Femme gelée (1981), the writer talked about her marriage, her children and her work as a teacher; She narrated the abortion in L’Evénement (2000), her mother’s death in Une femme (1987), the passion in Passion simple (1992), the family secret, her sister’s death before she was born in L’ Other Girl (2011) ; She also recounted the brutal start to sex life in Girl’s Memory (2016) and her city in Look at the lights my love, a log of the moments she spent in her Auchan hypermarket. Annie Ernaux provided a kind of synthesis of all of this in Les Années, published in 2008.
In her latest novel, The Young Man (Gallimard, 2022), Annie Ernaux returns in a short and dense text to the story she lived with a man thirty years her junior when she was in her fifties. An experience that connects her with her youth and always leads her back to what is important to her, writing. The young man is a reflection on the passage of time, on maturity, which makes each new experience reflect the previous ones, as in a great thinking box.
Annie Ernaux has also become a role model for a young generation of writers such as Edouard Louis. “Annie Ernaux told the working class; I tell the lower class. We continue what the others started. She made other stories possible, she opened doors,” he confided to Canadian newspaper La Presse at the time of publication Combats and Metamorphoses of a Woman, May 2021.
Maria Pourchet, author of Feu (Gallimard, 2021), confided in Le Monde in 2019 that she learned from Annie Ernaux “the role of language in girls’ education”. “She also allowed me to eliminate the style issue, the worry about looking pretty. She’s the clerk of reality,” she added. The Goncourt 2017, Nicolas Mathieu, or the historian and novelist Ivan Jablonka do not hide their admiration for Annie Ernaux.
The novelist was shortlisted in 2019 for the Man Booker International Prize in Literature for Les Années (2008, Gallimard), published in English in 2018, like most of her previously little-translated works into Shakespeare’s language.
If Annie Ernaux’s work has not yet been adapted for cinema, two of her novels have recently been published: Passion simple by Danielle Arbid, published in August, based on her novel published in 1992, in which she told the passion of a forty-year-old woman. One Year Old for a Married Man and L’Evénement by Audrey Diwan, Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, adapted from the 2000 novel in which she tells the story of her abortion.
The life and work of Annie Ernaux are also the focus of a documentary film, I like living there, by Régis Sauder, shot in Cergy-Pontoise (Val-d’Oise), where Annie Ernaux lived.