Biography of Annie Ernaux || Literary Foundation ||

 Annie Ernaux 

Annie Ernaux (Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux) is a French writer and professor of literature and Nobel Laureate who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022. she was born on 1st September 1940 in Lillebonne, France. Her parents ran a cafe and a grocery in a working-class part of Lillebonne town in Normandy where she was born and grew up. She was educated at the University of Rouen and then Bordeaux where she qualified as a school teacher and gained a higher degree in modern literature. She married  Philippe Ernaux and has two sons. But the couple divorced in the early 1980s.

Her Literary Career:-

Her literary career began in 1974 with "Les Armoires vides"  (Cleaned Out), an autobiographical novel. In 1984, she won the Renaudot Prize for "La Place" (A Man's Place)it is also an autobiographical work focusing on her relationship with her father and her experiences growing up in a small town in France. 

In her early stage, she focused on fictional works but later she turned to autobiographical novels. In her works, we find historical and individual experiences. As far as her individual experiences are concerned she portrays her parents' social advancement, her marriage, her passionate affair with a European man, her abortion, disease, death of her mother, and breast cancer. 

Her literary works are mostly autobiographical and maintain close links with sociology.

Her works include- A Man's Place (1983), Simple Passion (1991), Pura Pasion (1993), A frozen women (1994), Exteriors (1996), La Honte (1997), I Remain in Darkness (1998), La place (1983), Shame (1998),  Happening (2001), The possession (2008), Things seen (2010), A GIrl's story (2016), Getting Lost (2022). Her first three novels, Cleaned Out (1990), Do What They Say or Else (1977) and A Frozen Woman (1994), form a trilogy of autobiographical novels. These works broadly detail the socialization of a working-class girl who has a middle-class education and then marriage.

The central themes of her novels are body and sexuality, intimate relationships, and social inequality. Her books also explored how shame is built in the female consciousness and how women censor and judge themselves even in personal spaces such as a diary.