Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man's Place and A Woman's Story, have become contemporary classics in France. The Years won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008, the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life's work.
'With Getting Lost, Annie Ernaux goes for broke. The bed, the site
of her pleasure, is to her what the gaming table is to the gambler,
the bottle to the alcoholic, the syringe to the addict. The nexus
of all danger. The goal is not, as she seems to believe and tries
to make us believe, the necessity of passion: it is in reality only
a pretext for her to risk her life.' - Martine de Rabaudy,
L'Express
'From the very first lines, we feel ourselves, like her, caught up
in the vertigo of waiting, obsessed by the telephone that never
rings, time that passes too quickly and the meetings that become
less frequent. Love, death and literature are constantly
intertwined in this story that plunges us into the intimacy of a
couple, without ever giving us the impression of being voyeurs.' -
ELLE
'Reading her is like getting to know a friend, the way they tell
you about themselves over long conversations that sometimes take
years, revealing things slowly, looping back to some parts of their
life over and over.' - London Review of Books
'Annie Ernaux is one of my favorite contemporary writers, original
and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in
her world for months.' - Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood
'I find her work extraordinary.' - Eimear McBride, author of A Girl
is a Half-Formed Thing
'Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir's role of chronicler to a
generation.' - Margaret Drabble, New Statesman
'Across the ample particularities of over forty years and
twenty-one books, almost all short, subject-driven memoirs, Ernaux
has fundamentally destabilized and reinvented the genre in French
literature.' - The Nation
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