The Swedish Academy has awarded the Literature Nobel Prize to Annie Ernaux. Their announcements reads: “Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.”
Un grand bravo, Annie!
Today we’re seeing the publication of Getting Lost, the translation of Ernaux’s Se perdre (2001) – the diary written at the time of her romance with a Russian diplomat. Translated by Alison L. Strayer for the first time, Getting Lost is being published by Fitzcarraldo editions in the UK and by Seven Stories Press in the USA.
Annie Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot were invited to the Cannes festival to present their film Les Années super 8 which consists in home video footage shot between 1972 and 1981. The film was directed by David Ernaux-Briot, with text written and read by Annie Ernaux .
Image: Les Films Pelléas.
At the 2022 Turin book festival, Annie Ernaux has been awarded the Mondello Prize.
(source and photo/ report).
Audrey Diwan’s ‘Happening’ (L’événement) has won the Golden Lion in Venice for best film. Adapted from Ernaux’s autobiographical account, the film features Anamaria Vartolomei as Anne Duchesne, a student seeking a back-street abortion at a time when it was illegal in France.
The adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s 1991 Passion simple, by director Danielle Arbid, features actors Laetitia Dosch and Sergei Polunin. The love story between a Parisian lecturer and a Russian diplomat is available to watch on Curzon Home Cinema.
Set up and curated by Michèle Bacholle, who is also the author of many essays and a book on Ernaux, this ‘Musée Annie Ernaux‘ website provides an exploration into the main places which inhabit Ernaux’s writings – and in turn, the reader’s imagination. Through photographs and critical notes, Bacholle invites us to ‘enter’ these places.
As Annie Ernaux turns 80 this month, she features in an interview for the Financial Times (‘I never feel legitimate, yet I persevere’) and is named ‘Author of the month’ in the London Review Booskhop.
Régis Sauder’s documentary, J’ai aimé vivre là, is an evocation of Cergy-Pontoise, guided by the texts and voice of Annie Ernaux, who lives there. The film, which was presented at the International film festival in Marseilles in July 2020, will be out on screens in early 2021. The trailer and press review can be found here.
A Girl’s Story, the English translation of Mémoire de fille (trans. Alison L. Strayer), is being published simultaneously this week by Seven Stories Press and Fitzcarraldo Editions.