The French novelist and memoirist Annie Ernaux has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature. Ernaux, an autofiction innovator with about twenty works to her name, is published in the US by the indie press Seven Stories. The press tweeted an exuberant thread, including thanks for Ernauax’s English translators, Alison L. Strayer, Tanya Leslie, and Anna Moschovakis, and links to buy Ernaux hats and shirts with her name printed in a death-metal font. Bookshop.org is running a sale on her books (though most are now on backorder). Ernaux’s most recent book translated into English is Getting Lost. Recently, Jamie Hood wrote a comprehensive essay on Ernaux for The Baffler; in 2018, Gili Ostfield reviewed Ernaux’s The Years for Bookforum. You can watch a discussion with the author about that book on Shakespeare and Company’s YouTube page. The Paris Review has unlocked her diaries, translated by Strayer, from their spring 2002 issue. In 2020, Madeleine Schwartz wrote a review of A Girl’s Story and an appreciation of Ernaux’s radical candor; reviewing the same book for The Nation, Audrey Wollen wrote: “It is her foundational exigency: how to remember politically, in collective form.” Next Wednesday, Ernaux will appear at Barnard in conversation with Hari Kunzru (the event is now sold out, but the school is planning a live stream). The Super 8 Years, a film compiling home movies, directed by Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot, is showing at the New York Film Festival on Monday and Tuesday and will feature a Q and A with the directors. Ernaux and her son recently spoke about the movie with Filmmaker magazine. In a Nobel Prize preview posted yesterday at The Atlantic, Alex Shephard recommended starting with Ernaux’s Simple Passion (translated by Tanya Leslie), which he called “a powerful depiction of being lost—or perhaps enveloped—by another person and, with apologies to Graham Greene and Anne Serre, possibly the best book about an affair ever written.”
