Annie Ernaux has just been announced as this year’s winner of the Formentor prize, a prestigious international literary award.

Ernaux’sThe Years (trans. Alison Strayer) has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. The name of the winner will be revealed on May 21st.

 

The Years have been published with Fitzcarraldo editions (trans. Alison L. Strayer), https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-years. Here is the editor’s presentation:

“Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre – the collective autobiography – in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is ‘a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism’ (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.”

You can read an extract in the Times Literary Supplement: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/our-allegiance-to-the-blazing-nights/