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. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

‘[Shame and The Young Man] deserve to be read widely. Her work is self-revealing, a series of pitiless auto-autopsies….Their disparate achievements work together to illuminate something perennially fascinating about Ernaux: her relationship to revelation and visibility. These are deeply intimate books, but in another way, Ernaux brings a disquieting impersonality to her project.’— Megan Nolan, The Times