Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Swedish Academy honored Ernaux for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective constraints of personal memory. Her writing frequently transforms episodes from her own life into examinations of class, gender, education, sexuality, and social change.
Born in Normandy in 1940, Ernaux grew up in a working-class family and became a teacher before establishing herself as an author. Her books include The Years, A Woman’s Story, and Happening, which recounts her experience of an illegal abortion in 1960s France.
Ernaux’s work is often associated with autofiction, but she has emphasized the documentary and sociological dimensions of her writing. She became the seventeenth French-language literature laureate according to Nobel’s presentation of the award.