Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 6. The 82-year-old writer, whose sociological autofiction and memoir is influenced by Simone de Beauvoir and Pierre Bourdieu, is the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since the founding of the awards in 1901. Ernaux also becomes the 17th woman (among 119 Nobel Prize Laureates) to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
This follows her 2019 shortlisting for the Man Booker International Prize for Literature, for The Years (translated by Alison Strayer, originally published in 2008), a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 – acclaimed in France as a modern In Search of Lost Time.
