Author Guide ·
Books Written by
Ernaux writes short, unadorned books built almost entirely from lived experience using a flat, precise style she calls ‘flat writing,’ stripped of metaphor and consolation. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, the first French woman to do so, for what the committee called the courage with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Autofiction & Memoir · Updated August 2026
Quick facts
Born
September 1, 1940 · Lillebonne, France
Nationality
French
Books published
More than 20 since 1974
Major awards
Nobel Prize in Literature (2022)
Best known for
The Years (2008)
Notable first
First French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature
Autofiction · MemoirOn my shelf
The Years
Ernaux’s most ambitious book, tracing six decades of French social life from the 1940s to the 2000s through the collective ‘we’ and ‘she’ rather than the conventional memoir ‘I,’ using her own life as one thread among the larger fabric of postwar France.
Widely considered her masterpiece — the choice to write herself in third person turns personal memory into something closer to a generation’s collective autobiography.
Autofiction
Simple Passion
A short, precise account of an affair with a married foreign diplomat, and the way obsession reorganizes an entire life around waiting for a phone call. Ernaux refuses to romanticize or moralize the affair; she simply reports what desire did to her days.
One of the clearest demonstrations of her ‘flat writing’ method — the restraint of the prose is what makes the intensity of the feeling underneath it land so hard.
Memoir
A Man’s Place
Written shortly after her father’s death, this short memoir traces his life as a shopkeeper who rose out of poverty, and Ernaux’s own uneasy passage into the educated middle class that put a permanent distance between them.
The book that established her signature method — she wrote it deliberately without literary flourish, believing ornamentation would betray her father’s plain way of living and speaking.
Memoir
Happening
A direct, unflinching account of the illegal abortion Ernaux underwent in France in 1963, written decades later with the same clinical precision she brings to all her subjects. Adapted into the Golden Lion-winning 2021 film.
Reads less like a personal confession than a piece of testimony — Ernaux is explicit that she wrote it to give an accurate, undramatized record of what the experience was actually like.
Memoir · Co-authored
The Use of Photography
Co-written with photographer Marc Marie during Ernaux’s treatment for breast cancer, pairing photographs of their bedroom the morning after making love with short prose reflections on desire, illness, and mortality.
Her most formally unusual book — the photographs function as her usual precise, unembellished observation, just made literal rather than written.
Frequently asked questions about Annie Ernaux’s books
From the bookshelf
“To write is to fight forgetting.” — Annie Ernaux
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