‘Across the ample particularities of over forty years and twenty-one books, almost all short, subject-driven memoirs, Ernaux has fundamentally destabilized and reinvented the genre in French literature.’
- Audrey Wollen, The Nation

‘Annie Ernaux is one of my favorite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.’
- Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood

‘Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation.’
- Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

‘I find her work extraordinary.’
- Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

‘The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux’s work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething.’
- Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy

‘Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory... Ernaux does not so much reveal the past – she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it – as unpack it.’
- Madeleine Schwartz, New Yorker

Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. The Years won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008, the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work.

Tanya Leslie was the first translator of Annie Ernaux into English and translated a number of her works, including A Woman’s Story (1991), A Man’s Place (1992), Simple Passion (1993), Shame (1998), I Remain in Darkness (1999) and Happening (2001).