March 2026
“Every moment of that abortion was a surprise to me,” says Annie Ernaux. The French Nobel Prize laureate in literature is talking about a backstreet abortion that nearly killed her in 1963.
At the time she was a 23-year-old student with ambitions to become a writer. But as the first in a family of labourers and shopkeepers to go to university, she could feel her future slipping away.
Continued: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2022/ernaux/article/
Dec 12, 2025
Vibeke Venema and Laura Gozzi, BBC World Service
"Every moment of that abortion was a surprise to me," says Annie Ernaux.
The French Nobel literature laureate is talking about an illegal abortion that nearly ended her life in 1963.
She was a 23-year-old student with ambitions to become a writer. But as the first in a family of labourers and shopkeepers to go to university, she could feel her future slipping away.
Activists are calling to build a monument in Paris to honor the women who died from unsafe abortions before abortion was legalized in France in 1975.
By Solène Cordier
Sep 27, 2025
"I place my fate in your hands. And I ask if there might not be another way by performing an intervention, as I do not want this pregnancy and would do anything... and am capable of the worst. I beg you, doctor, do not abandon me." These few lines, dated November 13, 1972, were written by the mother of a 6-year-old boy, devastated by the discovery of a new pregnancy that was endangering her health. She wrote to the one she called "the man of lost causes" and, on a personal level, "my last hope": Professor Paul Milliez.
The forthcoming book Lettres pour un avortement illégal (1971-1974) ("Letters for an Illegal Abortion"), to be published on October 17, contains about 50 letters like this one. On Sunday, September 28, as part of International Safe Abortion Day, excerpts were to be read at the Maison de la Poésie, a cultural center in central Paris dedicated to poetry. During the event, there was to be an appeal to build a monument in memory of women who died from illegal abortions.
Struggles with Catholic moral values in dealing with life, death and sexuality
Charles Xuereb
June 8, 2025
Book review: L-Avveniment, by Annie Ernaux. Translated into Maltese by Claudine Borg
French author Annie Ernaux, Noble Prize winner for Literature in 2022, in her book L’Événement, originally published in 2000, honestly bares her heart with readers by choosing to describe a series of personal painful realisations: the undesired metamorphosis of her own body and what she is permitted to do with it.
In this short autobiographical narration at the threshold of her identity as an adult, Ernaux divulges her own tribulations when, as a university student back in 1963, she travailed in depressing solitude to find where she could illegally abort the unwanted ‘thing’ in her womb.
Continued: https://timesofmalta.com/article/maltese-translation-ernaux-l-evenement-hits-close-home.1110947
Hit drama The Years has seen audience members fainting hysterically. Perhaps if we dispensed with the red flags, people would enjoy this fine play
Kate Maltby
Sat 15 Feb 2025
If your Valentine disappointed you this weekend, spare a thought for the protagonist of The Years, the explosive West End play based on the writings of the French novelist and Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. A teenager is thrilled to discover she has attracted the temporary attention of an older man at summer camp. After he painfully takes her virginity, she gradually realises that he has told half the resort. She finds the word “whore” scribbled across her bathroom mirror. Still she yearns for the validation of his returning desire.
The play takes as its subject the full range of life experiences contingent on embodied womanhood. Like the Ernaux memoir from which it draws its name, its heroine tells her story in the plural “we” and speaks for a generation of war-born French women. To the frustration of its artists, however, one of those experiences has captured all the headlines.
As France commemorates 50 years since the law decriminalising abortion came into effect, prominent figures in politics and the arts are urging the government to exonerate women convicted for abortions before 1975.
Jan 17, 2025
We, activists, researchers, elected officials, demand the rehabilitation of women unjustly convicted of abortion,” they wrote in a petition published on the Libération website.
The law, first debated by MPs in 1974, was championed by health minister Simone Veil and adopted for a trial period of five years before being made permanent in 1979.
Annie Ernaux’s The Years is transferring to the West End. It’s about time the arts confront the way women’s bodies work
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
Fri 3 Jan 2025
Following a sold-out run at the Almeida theatre, this month The Years – a stage adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s choral novel of 21st-century womanhood – transfers to the West End. The play became somewhat notorious because of the impact that its abortion scene was having on audience members. In the scene, a bloodied Romola Garai recounts passing a dead foetus after an illegal backstreet abortion, a performance our theatre critic described as “devastating”. A preview last summer had to be stopped as several audience members requested medical assistance, while another shouted at the cast that the scene had been “a disgrace” and protested that “there was no warning” (content notes were, in fact, provided).
Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/03/the-years-annie-ernaux-abortion-play-west-end
Anne Magnan-Park focuses on the right to “end pregnancy voluntarily” in France.
WVPE 88.1 Elkhart/South Bend | By Anne Magnan Park
Published January 11, 2024
In her memoir entitled Happening [2], Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux retraces her experience as a 23-year-old promising student. Her narrative focuses on the abortion she received in January 1964, eleven years before abortion became legal in France [3], and during which she almost lost her life. In her memoir, Ernaux draws meticulously from her journals to stay true to the details of her psychological and physical ordeals.
A newly translated novel by the Argentinean writer Sara Gallardo provides a missing link in the history of abortion literature.
By S. C. Cornell
December 9, 2023
In the nineteenth century, when a character had premarital sex, you held your breath not for an abortion but for a wedding. Think of “Pride and Prejudice,” where Lydia’s child marriage comes as a great relief. The marriage plot relegates the actual having of children to the last page, just after the rice is thrown and the reader assured that our heroine will be happy and rich. If great Western literature of the time does allude to abortion, it does so subtly or with plausible deniability. The first time I read “War and Peace,” I managed to miss the suggestion that Hélène died of an overdose of abortifacient drugs. In “Middlemarch,” when Rosamond goes horseback riding against the explicit wishes of her doctor husband and subsequently miscarries, Eliot hastens to explain that this was a “misfortune” and that “there were plenty of reasons why she should be tempted to resume her riding.”
Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-abortion-plot
Audrey Diwan’s 1960s-set drama Happening is the latest in a wave of films on an issue that is increasingly topical
Rachel Pronger
Fri 22 Apr 2022
When Audrey Diwan first started writing a script about abortion, people would ask her why. Adapting Annie Ernaux’s memoir about the author’s struggle to obtain an illegal abortion as a student in 1960s France, Diwan knew the story was important, but it was difficult to persuade others of its relevance. Fast forward a few years, and no one is asking why. When Happening premiered at the Venice film festival last year, critics were quick to draw connections between the plight of Anne (the character in the film) and the tightening of abortion restrictions around the world. As it lands in UK cinemas this week, this period piece feels timelier than ever.
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