Shame WINNER OF THE 2022 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 [E]xceptionally deft and precise, the very epitome of all that language can doa surprisingly tender evocation of a bright, passionate and self-aware young girl growing up in her parents cafe-haberdashery-grocery in a small town in Normandy. Julie Myerson, Observer Annie Ernaux writes memoir with such generosity and vulnerable power that I find it difficult to separate my own memories from hers long after Ive finished reading. Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X Reading her is like getting to know a friend, the way they tell you about themselves over long conversations that sometimes take years, revealing things slowly, looping back to some parts of their life over and over. Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months. Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour I find her work extraordinary. Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoirs role of chronicler to a generation. Margaret Drabble, New Statesman 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 Its hard to fault a book that so elegantly and engagingly shows how past horrors of varying scale can consciously and subconsciously affect someone. [A] prescient and eminently readable book, as well as a great introduction to a giant of French literature. India Lewis, The Arts Desk A lesser writer would turn these experiences into misery memoirs, but Ernaux does not ask for our pity or our admiration. Its clear from the start that she doesnt much care whether we like her or not, because she has no interest in herself as an individual entity. She is an emblematic daughter of emblematic French parents, part of an inevitable historical process, which includes breaking away. Her interest is in examining the breakage ... Ernaux is the betrayer and her father the betrayed: this is the narrative undertow that makes A Mans Place so lacerating. Frances Wilson, Telegraph (Praise for A Man's Place) Not simply a short biography of man manacled to class assumptions, this is also, ironically, an exercise in the art of unsentimental writing ... The biography is also self-reflexive in its inquiry and suggests the question: what does it mean to contain a life within a number of pages? Mia Colleran, Irish Times (Praise for A Man's Place) Ernaux understands that writing about her parents is a form of betrayal. That she writes about their struggle to understand the middle-class literary world into which she has moved makes that betrayal all the more painful. But still she does it and it is thrilling to read Ernaux working out, word by word, what she deems appropriate to include in each text. In being willing to show her discomfort, her disdain and her honest, careful consideration of the dilemmas of writing about real, lived lives, Ernaux has struck upon a bold new way to write memoir. Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman (Praise for A Man's Place) The triumph of Ernauxs approach ... is to cherish commonplace emotions while elevating the banal expression of them ... A monument to passions that defy simple explanations.

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 dEnseignement par Correspondance. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her lifes work. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.