Ernaux grew up in Yvetot in Normandy. She is from a working-class background, but her parents eventually owned a café-grocery store. She studied at the universities of Rouen and then Bordeaux, qualifying as a school-teacher, and gaining a higher degree in modern literature. She worked for a time on a thesis project, unfinished, on Marivaux. In the early 1970s, she taught at the Bonneville Lycée, at the College of Évire in Annecy-le-Vieux, then in Pontoise, before joining the National Center for Distance Learning.
Literary career
Annie Ernaux started her literary career in 1974 with Les Armoires vides, an autobiographical novel. In 1984, she won the Renaudot Prize for another of her autobiographical works 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. 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. A Woman's Story,A Man's Place, and Simple Passion were recognized as The New York Times Notable Books, and A Woman's Story was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Shame was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, I Remain in Darkness a Top Memoir of 1999 by The Washington Post, and The Possession was listed as a Top Ten Book of 2008 by More Magazine. Her 2008 historical memoir Les Années, very well received by French critics, is considered by many to be her magnum opus. In this book Ernaux writes of herself in the third person for the first time, providing a vivid look at French society from just after the Second World War until the early 2000s. It is the poignant social history of a woman and of the evolving society she lived in. The Years won the 2008 Françoise-Mauriac Prize of the Académie française, the 2008 Marguerite Duras Prize, the 2008 French Language Prize, the 2009 Télégramme Readers Prize, and the 2016 Premio Strega Europeo Prize. Translated by Alison L. Strayer, The Years was a Finalist for the 31st Annual French-American Foundation Translation Prize. In 2018 she won the Premio Hemingway. Many of her works have been translated into English and published by Seven Stories Press. Ernaux is one of the seven founding authors from whom the press takes its name.
Awards and distinctions
1977 Prix d'Honneur for the 1977 novel Ce qu'ils disent ou rien
