Meet the author : Annie Ernaux
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On 6 October 2022, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Annie Ernaux.The Swedish Academy praised her ‘courage’ and the ‘clinical acuity’ with which the author of The Years examined ‘a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class’. This is an exceptional meeting with a major literary figure who has made her life the subject of all her books.
Extract from the Nobel Lecture by Annie Ernaux, 10 December 2022
In 1990, in a book called A Woman’s Story, Annie Ernaux situated her work as a writer: ‘below literature, somewhere between literature, sociology and history’. After the Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah in 2021 and the American poet Louise Glück in 2020, the Academy awarding the world’s most prestigious prize underlined Annie Ernaux’s faith in the ‘liberating power of writing’.
Annie Ernaux’s viscerally intimate oeuvre deconstructs biographical certainties while singularly engaging time and memory as the author searches tirelessly for her self. In one book after another – and again recently in Le jeune homme and the documentary Les années Super 8 – she has reinvented this writing of the self that the committed and feminist writer has never ceased to embody in such an astounding manner.
In search of lost time
Cleaned Out, Shame, Happening, A Frozen Woman, La Place, Simple Passion, Getting Lost, The Possession, The Years, A Girl’s Story … Books at the intersection of novelistic autobiography and social science that trace the events in the life of a woman born Annie Duchesne in Yvetot, Normandy in 1940, in an oppressive environment. It is the experience of a ‘class defector’, since the young woman rose from the modest grocery shop of her parents to the world of words and ideas by becoming a professor of literature and then a writer. The shame of her origins, the portrait of her father, the loss of her mother, sexuality, love, an abortion, a divorce, encounters, consuming passions, illness, death – in a word, life – make up the core of her work. ‘Not my life, nor her life, nor even a life. Life, with its contents that are the same for everyone but which we experience individually.’
About the moderator
Salomé Kiner holds a master’s in literature and a degree in journalism. After starting out as a literary columnist for arte.tv, she joined the Mouv’ morning show (Radio France) where she spent a year presenting ‘Les Lectures de Salomé Kiner’. Currently based in Switzerland, she divides her time between literary animation and reports for the written press. When her first novel, Grande couronne, was published in 2021, she received a letter from Annie Ernaux.
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Org. Passa Porta
picture © Catherine Hélie - Editions Gallimard
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