Annie Ernaux and the Courage of Memory

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Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, known for her stark and unsentimental style of writing

The Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022 was awarded to Annie Ernaux. She is the first French woman to receive it and only the seventeenth woman since the prize was first awarded in 1901.

The citation mentioned that the award was given “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”

You will notice the term used, “clinical acuity”, which is unusual. The reason lies in her style of writing, which she herself describes as “flat writing”. It is marked by a narration of facts, often hard-hitting, that make a statement against an oppressive society.

In her work, Annie Ernaux consistently examines, from different angles, a life marked by strong disparities of gender, language and class. Her writing returns to her roots, where her father ran a small shop and the family struggled to manage with little more than bare necessities. The disparities they experienced left a deep impression on her, and those personal memories became the central subject of her books.

She is now eighty-two, and it is perhaps an indication of how intense and enduring those memories have been that they continue to shape her writing even today.

In her Nobel Prize lecture delivered on 7 December 2022, she said, “I am finding the sentence that will give me the freedom and the firmness to speak without trembling in this place to which you have invited me this evening.”

It was the sentence written in her diary sixty years earlier that appeared before her with clarity and force:
“J’écrirai pour venger ma race.”
“I will write to avenge my people.”

Her path to authorship was long and arduous. Among her well-known works are A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story and The Years. Ernaux’s writing is uncompromising, expressed in plain language, what she calls “flat writing”, stripped of ornament.

And it is when she began writing with the courage to reveal the agony of class experience, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy, and the inability to understand who you are, that she achieved something admirable and enduring.


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