Annie Ernaux

Who is Annie Ernaux?

Annie Ernaux is a French writer.

She won the Prix Renaudot in 1984 for her book La Place, an autobiographical narrative focusing on her relationship with her father and her experiences growing up in a small town in France, and her subsequent process of moving into adulthood and away from her parents' place of origin.

As a child, Annie Ernaux lived in Yvetot in Normandy. Very early in her career, she turned away from fiction to concentrate on autobiography. Her work combines historic and individual experiences. She charts her parents' social progression, her adolescence, her marriage, her passionate affair with an eastern European man her abortion, Alzheimer's disease, the death of her mother and breast cancer. Ernaux also wrote L'écriture comme un couteau with Frédéric-Yves Jeannet.

Her latest novel Les années is considered her 'magnum opus' and was very well received by the French critics. In this latter book Ernaux writes of herself in third person point of view for the first time. She gives a vivid look at French society from after Second World War until today. It is the poignant social history of a woman and of the society she lived in.