La honte (French Edition) by Annie Ernaux

Description

Annie Ernaux started her literary career in 1974 with
Les Armoires vides
(Cleaned Out), an autobiographical novel. In 1984, she won the Renaudot Prize for another of her autobiographical works
La Place
(A Man's Place), an
autobiographical
narrative focusing on her relationship with her father and her experiences growing up in a small town in France, and her subsequent process of moving into adulthood and away from her parents' place of origin.
[6]
[7]
Very early in her career, she turned away from fiction to concentrate on autobiography.
[8]
Her work combines historic and individual experiences. She charts her parents' social progression (
La place
,
La honte
), her adolescence (
Ce qu'ils disent ou rien
), her marriage (
La femme gelée
), her passionate affair with an eastern European man (
Passion simple
), her abortion (
L'événement
),
Alzheimer's disease
(
Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit
), the death of her mother (
Une femme
), and
breast cancer
(
L'usage de la photo
).
[9]
Ernaux also wrote
L'écriture comme un couteau
(Writing as Sharp as a Knife) with
Frédéric-Yves Jeannet
.
[9]
A Woman's Story,
A Man's Place,
and
Simple Passion
were recognized as
The New York Times
Notable Books, and
A Woman's Story
was a Finalist for the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize
.
Shame
was named a
Publishers Weekly
Best Book of 1998,
I Remain in Darkness
a Top Memoir of 1999 by
The Washington Post
, and
The Possession
was listed as a Top Ten Book of 2008 by More Magazine.
Her 2008 historical memoir
Les Années
(The Years), very well received by French critics, is considered by many to be her magnum opus.
[10]
In this book Ernaux writes of herself in the third person (
elle
) for the first time, providing a vivid look at French society from just after the Second World War until the early 2000s.
[11]
It is the poignant social history of a woman and of the evolving society she lived in.
The Years
won the 2008 Françoise-Mauriac Prize of the
Académie française
, the 2008
Marguerite Duras Prize
,
[12]
the 2008 French Language Prize, the 2009
Télégramme
Readers Prize, and the 2016
Premio Strega Europeo
Prize. Translated by Alison L. Strayer,
The Years
was a Finalist for the 31st Annual
French-American Foundation
Translation Prize. In 2018 she won the Premio Hemingway.
Many of her works have been translated into English and published by
Seven Stories Press
. Ernaux is one of the seven founding authors from whom the press takes its name.