Who is Annie Ernaux? Five things to know about the Nobel Prize in Literature winner

This afternoon it was announced that French writer Annie Ernaux has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.

The prestigious prize was awarded to the 82-year-old “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. The writer, who is published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions, will receive 10 million Swedish kronor (about £807,000) for the win.

According to the permanent secretary of the Nobel Committee, Mats Malm, as the news of Earnaux’s win broke, the Academy had not yet been able to get in touch with the writer to tell her the news.

Although Ernaux has become better known over the past decade since the publication of her magnum opus, Les Années (The Years) in 2008, she is not as well known as some of the Nobel Prize in Literature’s past winners - such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Bob Dylan, Harold Pinter, Günter Grass, Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, Claude Simon, Gabriel García Márquez and Saul Bellow.

Ernaux has written 23 novels (which have been translated into 36 languages and counting) and has won numerous literary prizes over the course of her 50-year career, including winning the Prix Renaudot in 1984 for La Place, winning the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her work in 2017, being shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for The Years in 2019, and being elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in 2021.

However, earlier in her career, she was largely looked down upon by French literary critics, with her work reportedly being called “impudique” or indecent, with one French magazine even giving her the vicious title “Madame Ovary”.

A Parisian publisher told the Financial Times, “She used to be despised — ‘a little teacher from the province’, ‘a woman who wrote about herself’. Now, a bit like Marguerite Duras, she writes down her groceries list and everyone finds it amazing.”

Ernaux was born in Normandy in 1940 into a working-class family and became a school teacher before turning her hand to writing. She published her first novel, a work of fiction, when she was 34, but quickly abandoned that style of writing, opting instead for a unique form of autofiction (before the term had been properly coined) where she blends memory with historical events.

Her work is usually an investigation of certain moments from her own life - such as her relationship with her parents, sexual relationships, her illegal abortion aged 23 years old, her marriage, her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and death, and of getting breast cancer.

Here’s our round of five things to know about the newest Nobel laureate, Annie Ernaux.

She published her first novel when she was 34

Ernaux’s first novel, Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out), was published in 1974. According to Ernaux, she wrote the novel in secret, pretending instead that she was working on her PhD thesis. When the novel was picked up by Gallimard (a prestigious publishing house whose best-selling authors include Albert Camus and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) her husband was upset, saying, “If you’re capable of writing a book in secret, then you’re capable of cheating on me.”

The novel detailed her working-class childhood and dangerous illegal abortion (abortion was only legalised in France in 1975). Ernaux has stayed politically to the far left her whole life, more recently speaking out against French president Macron and supporting the Gilets Jaunes movement in France. “I come from a line of people who could have been Yellow Vests,” Ernaux said to the New York Times in a 2020 interview.

🎉🎉🎉We are over the moon that Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature! 🎉🎉🎉https://t.co/ADSRwrZAm5

— Fitzcarraldo Editions (@FitzcarraldoEds) October 6, 2022

Les Années (The Years) is considered to be her magnum opus

Ernaux wasn’t very well known outside of France, but all this changed after the publication of her 2008 novel The Years. The book, which is entirely written using “elle”, or she, despite being about her own life, won the Françoise-Mauriac Prize of the Académie Française and the Marguerite Duras Prize. In 2019 it also won the author a nomination for the International Booker Prize.

The novel follows a woman’s life across 60 years, mixing together personal reflections with observations about society as it changes.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2019, Ernaux said: “I’m not a writer who focuses on emotions and this is not the subject of The Years. The point is not to speak of the personal. The personal can be gathered through the descriptions of the photos. I fix on a photo [for each decade] and describe the clothes, the light, and place myself in that moment. Through the photos I touch on the death of my father, very briefly, and the children, but I do not speak often of sentiments.”

She has written searing works about her 1974 abortion

Ernaux has written numerous times about her 1974 abortion, which makes her Nobel Prize win, following this summer’s US Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe v Wade, seem particularly meaningful, despite the literary academy saying, “We concentrate on literature and literary quality” rather than political events.

Her 2000 Goncourt prize-nominated novel L’Événement (Happening) was adapted into a film by Audrey Diwan in 2021, which went on to win the Golden Lion award at Venice Film Festival.

“I realise this account may exasperate or repel some readers,” writes Ernaux in Happening. “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled. There is no such thing as a lesser truth. Moreover, if I failed to go through with this undertaking, I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by the patriarchy.”

Then, speaking to the Guardian in April this year, she said: “I wrote Happening to preserve the memory of the savagery inflicted on millions of girls and women. Maybe it’s a shocking thing to say, but that’s what I was trying to do in Happening: to give a kind of grandeur to an act that is so connected to the body, to death, to time.”

Diwan’s Happening wasn’t the only time Ernaux’s work has made it to film: Danielle Arbid adapted her 1991 novel A Simple Passion into a film in 2020 (which was shown at Cannes and starred Lætitia Dosch and Sergei Polunin). This year Ernaux also wrote and directed The Super 8 Years alongside her son David Ernaux-Briot, which collated home videos that had been filmed by Ernaux and her family.

Ernaux is fully behind the #Metoo movement

When Catherine Deneuve said the movement had gone too far, Ernaux said to the Guardian: “I was so ashamed for Deneuve when she said what she did… It was the reflection of a group of privileged women. To be honest, I found it… disgusting is the word. I am in absolute agreement with #MeToo.

“Certainly there are excesses but the important thing is that women don’t accept this kind of behaviour anymore. In France we hear so much about our culture of seduction, but it’s not seduction, it’s male domination. The abuse is not just in the sexual domain – it’s present everywhere, including in literature.”

Ernaux has long been a champion of women, writing and speaking openly and unapologetically about female sexuality (such as in A Simple Passion) and has cited Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as some of the most influential books of her life. She said to the FT in 2020: “In France, literature is a man’s world. All the prizes, everything is controlled by men. Now people say I have legitimacy, but I’ve had to wait to be over 50. I’ve never given a damn. I never feel legitimate and at the same time I persevere... Women need more strength to write.”

In the same interview with the FT she said: “How I view my life as a woman, it’s Simone de Beauvoir. Her intervention is brutal and stupendous. I understand that the world is made by and for men.”

She seems at peace with getting older

Speaking to the Guardian in 2019, Ernaux said that the period of her life that was “the most luminous” was between the ages of 45 and 60. “I had the impression of really being a free woman doing what I want. It was a time of great liberty for me, when I felt good about life,” she said.

But decades later, she is still enjoying her life: “I will be 79 this year and there are always those little health problems and tiredness. There’s a woman in one of Simone de Beauvoir’s last books who says there is a douceur [sweetness] in having a long past behind her. That’s one of the feelings one can have at this age and it’s very positive.”

Though, she does not want to lose the knowledge she has garnered over the course of her life, as her mother did. In a New York Times interview in 2020 she said: “Frankly, I’d rather die now than lose everything I’ve seen and heard. Memory, to me, is inexhaustible.”