'I will write to avenge my people.' It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defence of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on 7 December 2022. To write of her own life, she asserts, is to 'shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed'; to mine individual experience is to find collective emancipation. Ernaux's speech is a bold assertion of the capacity of writing to give people a sense of their own worth, and of one writer's commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys and its injustices.

About the Author

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 d'Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man's Place and A Woman's Story, have become contemporary classics in France. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

'Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir's role of chronicler to a generation.'
- Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

'Her work attests to the ways in which an individual story is linked to shared histories and her documentation of personal oppression is part of a struggle for collective freedom.'
- Jessica Andrews, Elle UK

Book Information
ISBN 9781804270707
Author Annie Ernaux
Format Paperback
Page Count 48
Imprint Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions