'She's a courageous woman.'Īn adaptation of Ernaux's 2000 novel 'Happening', about her experiences of having an abortion when it was still illegal in France in the 1960s, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. 'It's a long path that she makes in her life,' Swedish Academy member Anders Olsson told Reuters. 'It is her most ambitious project, which has given her an international reputation and a raft of followers and literary disciples,' the academy said of that book.īy substituting in her narrative 'the spontaneous memory of the self with the third person of collective memory', the academy said of 'The Years', Ernaux merges together the personal and collective memory.īorn to a modest family of grocers from Normandy in northern France, Ernaux writes in a frank, direct style about class and how she struggled to adopt the codes and habits of the French bourgeoisie while staying true to her working class background. Her debut novel was 'Les Armoires Vides' in 1974 but she gained international recognition following the publication of 'Les Années' in 2008, translated into English as 'The Years' in 2017. 'And for this purpose she uses language as 'a knife', as she calls it, to tear apart the veils of imagination,' the academy said. She has previously said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes to social inequality.

Ernaux, the first French woman to win the literature prize, said winning the award was 'immense'.

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