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.
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.
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