WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
Annie Ernaux's most recent book, published in France in 2022, now available in English by her acclaimed translator Alison Strayer.
The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the 1990s when she had an affair with a man 30 years her junior.
Annie Ernaux's most recent book, published in France in 2022, now available in English by her acclaimed translator Alison Strayer.
The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the 1990s when she had an affair with a man 30 years her junior.
In The Young Man, Ernaux recounts a relationship that made her become again—for several months—the “scandalous girl” of her younger years. This is a key text in the work of Annie Ernaux’s relationship to time and writing.
This work of literary nonfiction is emblematic of the feminist and sociological thought in Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Prize-winning body of work. The book takes place in Rouen, where Ernaux studied in the early 1960s, and begins in a student apartment, where A. lives — we only know her lover’s initial. The windows of his apartment look out at the hospital where Ernaux experienced her secret abortion thirty years prior. A. takes the narrator back to memories her own youth and makes her feel ageless, outside of time — she has the sense that she is living her life backwards.
Here Ernaux again explores shame — she considers how A.’s friends ask him how he can be with a woman in menopause — and anticipation for their next encounter, quintessential and masterfully excavating themes from her previous books like Simple Passion and her New York Times bestseller Getting Lost.
Collected in
New and Forthcoming Books from Seven Stories Press
The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, ANNIE ERNAUX is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place.
