Author Guide · Autofiction and Memoir
Books Written by
Ernaux writes short, unadorned books built almost entirely from her own life: her parents’ café-grocery in Normandy, an illegal abortion, a love affair, her mother’s dementia, a supermarket. She calls the method écriture plate, flat writing, stripped of metaphor and consolation, and she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, the first French woman to do so. Most of her books are under a hundred and fifty pages, and several tell the same event twice, once as a book and once as the diary behind it. This guide has every Annie Ernaux book in English, in the order she wrote them, and where to start.
By Lisanne Swart · 19 books in English · autofiction · memoir · diaries · Female Authors · 1974–2022 · Updated September 2026
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Quick answer
Annie Ernaux has published more than twenty books in French since 1974, and nineteen of them are available in English. The best known are A Man’s Place (1983), Simple Passion (1991), Happening (2000) and The Years (2008). Start with A Man’s Place if you want the method in fifty pages, or The Years if you want her masterpiece. The most recent English translation is The Other Girl (2025). All her books in order →
Where to Start with Annie Ernaux
If you want the method in one sitting
→ A Man’s Place, about her father. Fifty pages, and the book where the flat style begins.
If you want her masterpiece
→ The Years. Read one short book first, so you recognise the voice when it widens into a whole generation.
If you want to read the same event twice
→ Simple Passion and then Getting Lost, the diary of the same affair published ten years later. The gap between the two is the best lesson in what she leaves out.
If you want her on her mother
→ A Woman’s Story, then I Remain in Darkness, the notes she kept during her mother’s dementia.
If you want more writing like this
→ My personal essays reading list, for writers who turn their own lives into evidence.
Annie Ernaux Books in Order, from 1974 to 2022
Cleaned Out
Her first book. Denise Lesur, a student, waits out the aftermath of an illegal abortion and looks back on a childhood above her parents’ café-grocery, and on the education that made her ashamed of it. Angrier and more crowded than anything she wrote later, and already about everything she wrote later.
Do What They Say or Else
A teenage girl’s summer holiday, her first sexual experience, and the widening silence between her and her working-class parents. Her second novel, and one of the last of her books to reach English.
A Frozen Woman
A woman’s marriage and motherhood, and the slow way domestic life freezes her ambitions. The last of her three early novels, before she abandoned fiction for good.
A Man’s Place
Written after her father’s death: his life as a labourer who became the owner of a café-grocery in Normandy, and her own passage into the educated middle class that put a permanent distance between them. The first book in the style she is now known for, and it won the Prix Renaudot.
She wrote it with no literary flourish on purpose, because ornament would have betrayed the way her father lived and spoke. That decision is the whole of her method, and it is right here in fifty pages.
— LisanneA Woman’s Story
The companion to A Man’s Place, about her mother, written after her death: the woman who ran the family shop and pushed her daughter towards the education that would separate them, and who ended her life with dementia.
Simple Passion
A short, precise account of an affair with a married diplomat from Eastern Europe, and of how obsession reorganises an entire life around waiting for a phone call. She neither romanticises nor moralises it; she reports what desire did to her days. Filmed by Danielle Arbid in 2020.
Exteriors
Things seen and overheard in the new town of Cergy, where she lives: on trains and in supermarkets. A journal turned outward, recording other people instead of herself.
Shame
On a Sunday in June 1952, when she was nearly twelve, her father tried to kill her mother. That same evening the family opened the café as usual. The book is about that afternoon, and about the shame that followed her from it into school, church and class.
I Remain in Darkness
The notes she kept while visiting her mother through her final years of dementia, published unrevised. The raw material behind A Woman’s Story, and harder to read than the book it became.
Happening
A direct, unflinching account of the illegal abortion she had in 1963, as a student, written decades later with the same clinical precision she brings to everything. Adapted by Audrey Diwan into the film that won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2021.
It reads less like a confession than like testimony. She is explicit that she wrote it to leave an accurate, undramatised record of what it was actually like, and the plainness is what makes it unbearable.
— LisanneThings Seen
The sequel to Exteriors, covering 1993 to 1999: public life recorded in fragments.
Getting Lost
The unrevised diary of the affair behind Simple Passion, with S., a Soviet diplomat she met in Leningrad in 1988. Longer, messier and more exposed than the novel, and the best way to see what her flatness costs her.
The Possession
After she leaves a lover, he moves in with another woman, and she becomes obsessed with the rival she has never seen. Jealousy recorded as precisely as she records everything else.
The Use of Photography
Written with the journalist Marc Marie, whom she met in 2003 while being treated for breast cancer. They photographed the clothes left strewn on the floor after they made love, and each wrote about the pictures separately. Her most formally unusual book.
The Years
Her most ambitious book: French life from 1941 to 2006, told through photographs, songs, slogans and dinner-table talk, with her own life as one thread among many. For the first time she writes herself as “she”, and the book becomes something closer to a generation’s autobiography.
The choice to write herself in the third person turns one woman’s memory into a collective one. It is the book I would hand to someone who thinks memoir has to be about the self.
— LisanneThe Other Girl
Her parents had a daughter who died of diphtheria at six, two and a half years before Ernaux was born, and nobody ever spoke of her. A short book about the sister she never knew. Her most recent book to appear in English.
Look at the Lights, My Love
A year of visits to the Auchan hypermarket in Cergy, November 2012 to October 2013, recorded as fieldwork: who shops, what they buy, and what the aisles reveal about class.
A Girl’s Story
The summer of 1958, when she worked at a holiday camp at eighteen, her first sexual experience, and the humiliation that followed. Nearly sixty years later she writes about the girl she was as if she were someone else. Filmed by Judith Godrèche, premiered at Cannes in 2026.
The Young Man
Forty pages about her affair with a student some thirty years younger, and how being with him sent her back into her own past. Her last book before the Nobel.
Not Yet in English, and the Nobel Lecture
The years above are the French first editions; the English translations often came decades later, and the order you can buy them in says nothing about the order she wrote them. These are the remaining books, most of them available only in French.
Open a form to see the titles.
Only in French
6
L’Écriture comme un couteau 2003
A book-length conversation with Frédéric-Yves Jeannet about how and why she writes.
L’Atelier noir 2011
Her writing notebooks, the working drafts behind the books.
Écrire la vie 2011
A large one-volume anthology of her work, with photographs and diary extracts.
Retour à Yvetot 2013
A talk given on returning to the town where she grew up.
Le Vrai Lieu 2014
Interviews with Michelle Porte.
Hôtel Casanova 2020
A collection of short texts.
The Nobel lecture
1
I Will Write to Avenge My People 2022
Her Nobel lecture, since published as a short book. The title is a line she wrote in her diary as a young woman.
Bookshop.org and more
The years · 1940–2022
Quick facts about Annie Ernaux
- Known for
- Annie Ernaux is known for short, plain books built from her own life, in what she calls flat writing, above all The Years and A Man’s Place.
- 1940
- Born in Lillebonne, Normandy
- 1974
- First book in French
- 1983
- A Man’s Place
- 2008
- The Years
- 2022
- Nobel Prize in Literature
- Born
- 1 September 1940, Lillebonne, Normandy; grew up in Yvetot
- Nationality
- French
- Worked as
- A teacher, including 23 years at France’s national distance-learning centre
- Lives
- Cergy, near Paris, since the 1970s
- Books
- More than twenty in French since 1974; nineteen in English
- Nobel Prize
- Literature, 2022, the first French woman to win it
- Other honours
- Prix Renaudot (1984); International Booker shortlist (2019)
- Style
- Écriture plate: flat, plain writing without metaphor
The red mark is 1983: A Man’s Place, which this guide suggests starting with for her method in fifty pages.
Annie Ernaux’s Writing Style: Flat on Purpose
Ernaux’s style is often described as cold, and that misreads it. The flatness is a moral decision. When she came to write about her father in A Man’s Place, she decided that the literary language she had learned at university would betray a man who had never spoken it. So she took the ornament out: no metaphor, no lyricism, no comforting shape. What is left is the fact, set down as exactly as she can manage.
The second thing is that she writes as an ethnographer of herself. Her subject is class: what it does to a body, a kitchen, a way of speaking, and what it costs to move out of one. Her own life is the evidence because it is the evidence she has, not because it is special.
The third is repetition. Ernaux keeps going back to the same events, the father, the mother, the abortion, the affair, the summer of 1958, and she publishes both the finished book and the raw diary behind it. Reading them side by side shows how much work goes into looking effortless.
And in The Years all of it widens. The “I” becomes “she” and “we”, and one life becomes a record of a whole generation of French women. That is the book the Nobel committee was really rewarding, and the one the rest of her work leads to.
Watch
Annie Ernaux in conversation with Jeffrey Brown
Recorded for PBS NewsHour in Stockholm in December 2022, the week she gave her Nobel lecture. She talks to Jeffrey Brown about work that mixes fiction and memoir, and about what she hopes it has done for the people who read it.
Frequently asked questions about Annie Ernaux’s books
How many books has Annie Ernaux written?
More than twenty in French since 1974, most of them short works of autofiction, memoir and diary. Nineteen are available in English, from Cleaned Out (1974) to The Young Man (2022).
What was Annie Ernaux’s first book?
Les Armoires vides (1974), published in English as Cleaned Out (1990): a novel about a student waiting out the aftermath of an illegal abortion. Two more novels followed, Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (1977) and La Femme gelée (1981), before A Man’s Place (1983) marked her turn to the plain documentary style she is known for and won the Prix Renaudot.
What were Annie Ernaux’s first three published books?
Three novels: Les Armoires vides (1974, in English Cleaned Out), Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (1977, Do What They Say or Else) and La Femme gelée (1981, A Frozen Woman). All three are fiction drawn closely from her own life. With A Man’s Place (1983) she stopped writing novels.
What is the best Annie Ernaux book to start with?
A Man’s Place if you want the method in fifty pages; The Years if you want her most ambitious and most widely read book. Many readers start with The Years, but it lands harder once you know the voice from one of the short books.
In what order should I read Annie Ernaux?
There is no series, so any order works. A good route is A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story (her parents), then Shame and Happening, then The Years. Read Simple Passion before Getting Lost, which is the diary of the same affair.
Did Annie Ernaux win the Nobel Prize?
Yes. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, the first French woman to receive it, “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
What is écriture plate?
Flat writing: Ernaux’s name for her plain, unadorned style, without metaphor or lyricism. She adopted it in A Man’s Place, because she felt literary language would betray her working-class father’s world and the way he spoke.
What is The Years about?
It tells French life from 1941 to 2006 through photographs, songs, slogans and family conversations, with Ernaux’s own life as one thread among many. She writes about herself as “she” for the first time. The English translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019.
What is Annie Ernaux’s newest book?
Her most recent new book is The Young Man (2022). The most recent translation into English is The Other Girl (2025), first published in French in 2011.
Which Annie Ernaux books have been made into films?
Happening (Audrey Diwan, 2021, Golden Lion at Venice), Simple Passion (Danielle Arbid, 2020) and A Girl’s Story (Judith Godrèche, premiered at Cannes in 2026).
What is the difference between Simple Passion and Getting Lost?
They describe the same affair, with a Soviet diplomat, beginning in 1988. Simple Passion (1991) is the finished book; Getting Lost (2001) is the diary she kept at the time, published unrevised.
Is Annie Ernaux’s writing fiction or memoir?
Almost all of it is drawn from her own life. Her first three books were novels; from A Man’s Place (1983) on she stopped inventing, though she does not call her books memoirs either. Autofiction is the usual label; she herself has called her approach auto-socio-biography, writing about her own life to show the social world around it.
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Footnotes
- Annie Ernaux — Wikipedia
- The Nobel Prize in Literature 2022: Biobibliography — NobelPrize.org
- Annie Ernaux: Nobel Prize lecture — NobelPrize.org
- Publications — annie-ernaux.org
- News — annie-ernaux.org
- The Years — Wikipedia
- Getting Lost — Wikipedia
- Shame — Fitzcarraldo Editions
- The Use of Photography — Fitzcarraldo Editions
- The Other Girl — Fitzcarraldo Editions
- The Young Man — Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Look at the Lights, My Love — Kirkus Reviews
Bibliography last verified 21 September 2026. Years are the French first editions, with the English translation year in each entry; several books were retranslated or retitled. The upload date of the interview below could not be confirmed and is left out of this page’s structured data.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I will write to avenge my people.”
— Annie Ernaux, quoting her own early diary in her Nobel lecture, 2022
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