In congratulating her, the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, said that she was the voice "of the freedom of women and of the forgotten".

You have to stretch the screen like this,” she adds, before showing me another shot, taken from the audience, of the moment she received the prize from the king of Sweden. She knows that possessions can’t make people happy, but also acknowledges the popular belief that this “was no reason to abandon things. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. All of her work blends together her own personal experiences as well as collective historical experiences to create heartbreakingly beautiful memoirs that take the reader by the hand and gently lead them through the passing of time. 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.

It has been expertly rendered into English by Alison Strayer, who captures all the shadings of Ernaux’s prose, all its stops and starts, its changes in pace and in tone, its chatterings, its silences.

How digest the relationship between youthful hopes and imperfectly made decisions when it is a question more tangled than cause and effect? With her interest in memory and in writing a life, said Testard, “Proust is quite an obvious antecedent” for Ernaux. In contrast, The Young Man is a book about sexual empowerment, of coming into one’s own as a sexual subject and enjoying the maturity that brings.For those still doubting Annie Ernaux’s place in French literature – she’s right at the top – we cannot recommend reading The Years enough.

Originally published there in 2008, it was immediately heralded as Ernaux’s masterpiece, her brief Remembrance of Things Past. In the press release accompanying the Nobel announcement, it was said that Ernaux had been awarded the prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Life, caught up in meaningless rituals, feels as if it’s slipping by, but at the same time “progress” has landed us in a place we no longer recognize. She is also influenced by Simone de Beauvoir, although the two women have very different social backgrounds.With this feature of book, Edmund White described it as a "collective autobiography", in his review for The New York Times.

It was a radical decision to become effectively a single mother to her two young sons, David and Eric, in a time and place when such a status was uncommon, and in a country shaped by centuries of devout Catholicism. At the same time, Ernaux's children have grown and now visit her with their spouses, which makes her feel even older than she is.

Applauded as the finest work of fiction to appear about the Yugoslav Wars, acclaimed poet and novelist Ivana Bodrožić’s The Hotel Titois at its heart a story of a young girl’s coming of age, a reminder that even during times of war—especially during such times—the future rests with those who are the innocent victims and peaceful survivors. Annie Ernaux’s book blends memories, dreams, facts and meditations into a unique evocation of the times in which we lived, and live. Faced with an unplanned pregnancy, this book is a journey through Ernaux’s emotions as she attempts to coax a doctor to carry out an abortion.