French writer Annie Ernaux has finally won the Nobel Prize for Literature, after years of being touted to take the trophy. This makes her the 17th woman to win the prize, out of 119 total recipients.
The 82-year-old was announced as the winner by the Nobel Prize committee yesterday, who lauded her 50-year body of work as “uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.” She is beloved as a writer, constantly toeing the line between fiction of nonfiction while she dissects her own life, sex and political realities.
Hailed as the “pioneer of French autofiction”, Ernaux has been praised over and over again for her selection of works - most notably, her magnum opus ‘Les Années’ (The Years), which was published in 2008 but only truly made a dent in British audiences around 2019, when it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Ernaux’s work was not always met with immediate understanding and appreciation. In an interview with the Financial Times two years ago, Ernaux noted that every time she had something published, reviews of her work were guaranteed to feature the word “impudique” — indecent.
And not just for her work surrounding sexuality, either. It was even levelled at the diary she kept during her mother’s struggle with Alzheimers, Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit (I Remain in Darkness), which was published in 1997. “People would see indecency everywhere,” she told the FT. “In reality it was only [targeted at] women.”
But now, nearly half a century after publishing her first novel, Ernaux is raking in the respect and recognition she deserved from the start, and we’re here for it. So while we’re at it - here are some of the author’s best quotes, because everyone deserves a good dose of Annie Ernaux today.
Annie Ernaux’s best quotes
“Having received the keys to understanding shame does not give the power to erase it.” A Girl’s Story, 2016
“Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?” I Remain in Darkness, 1998
“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.” Happening, 2001
“Trace it all back, call it all up, fit it all together, an assembly line, one thing after another. Explain why I am shut up here in a crummy dorm room, terrified of dying and of what’s going to happen. Figure it out, get to the bottom of it all between contractions. Find out where the whole mess began.” Cleaned Out, 1990
“It was only the day before yesterday that I overcame the fear of writing ‘My mother died’ on a blank sheet of paper, not as the first line of a letter but as the opening of a book.” A Woman’s Story, 1988
“It was her voice, together with her words, her hands, and her way of moving and laughing which linked the woman I am to the child I once was. The last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.” A Woman’s Story, 1988
“Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written - when only I can see them - from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love without contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences.” Simple Passion, 1991
“Pain cannot be kept intact, it needs to be ‘processed,’ converted into humour.” I Remain In Darkness, 1998
“At every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we're told to think - no less by books or ads in the metro than by funny stories - are other things that society hush up without knowing it is doing so. thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things. then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognised at last, while underneath other silences start to form.” The Years, 2008
“She teaches me that the world is made to be pounced on and enjoyed, and that there is absolutely no reason at all to hold back.” A Frozen Woman, 1994
