Annie Ernaux is a French writer, born in 1940 in Lillebonne and raised in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery, a milieu whose textures, shames and loyalties have fed her entire body of work.
Over five decades she has refined a form all her own, somewhere between memoir, sociology and collective history, written in what she calls "flat writing": plain, scrupulously unadorned prose that refuses to prettify experience.
Her books include A Man's Place and A Woman's Story, on her father and mother; Happening, her unflinching account of an illegal abortion in 1963; and Simple Passion, on obsessive love.
The Years, first published in France in 2008, is widely considered her masterpiece: an "impersonal autobiography" that tells the story of a woman's life from 1941 to 2006 almost entirely without the word "I", threading private memory through six decades of French collective experience, its adverts, slogans, dinner-table talk and shifting mores. Its English translation by Alison L. Strayer was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, and in 2022 Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for, in the Academy's words, the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.
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