A conversation with Annie Ernaux: watch the replay!
23 October 2022
Sunday 23 October 2022 at 6pm Grand Salon of Villa Medici Meeting in French with simultaneous translation into Italianand live streaming Watch the replay:
This Sunday 23 October, Villa Medici is honoured to welcome Annie Ernaux, a major figure in contemporary French literature, recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. She is the sixteenth Frenchwoman and the seventeenth woman to receive this prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
She received the Nobel Prize for a life’s work of universal significance:
“These 60 years are recounted by a memory, but without this memory appearing personal. It is the memory of events, of songs, of laws that change, of religion. It is a journey in which everyone can inscribe themselves, or at least feel this passage.” Annie Ernaux, Villa Médicis, 23 October 2022
Annie Ernaux is in conversation with her Italian translator and publisher Lorenzo Flabbi of L’orma editore about her life as a writer, woman of letters and now as a film director.
Annie Ernaux’s books were offered to the public thanks to the Librairie Stendhal.
As part of her visit to the 17th edition of the Rome Film Festival, Annie Ernaux has presented her documentary Les Années super 8, made with her son David Ernaux-Briot.
Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux, born in 1940, spent her childhood and adolescence in a small town in Normandy, where her parents ran a grocery shop in a working-class neighbourhood. She began writing while studying literature in Rouen. After becoming a teacher in Haute-Savoie, she published her first novel, Les armoires vides, in 1974, which describes the heartbreak of social climbing. From La place (1984) onwards, a text dedicated to her father, she definitively breaks with fiction and engages in an exploration of her lived experience while seeking new forms of autobiography. The “I” disappears in favour of the “we” and the “one” in Les années, published in 2008, an account, between history and memory, of a generation, which won the Marguerite-Duras Prize.
Other published works include: La femme gelée, 1981; Une femme, 1988; Passion simple, 1992; Journal du dehors, 1993; La honte, 1997; Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit, 1997; L’événement, 2000; L’occupation, 2002; L’Usage de la photo, 2005; Mémoire de fille, 2016; Le Jeune Homme, 2022.
In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, distances and collective constraints of personal memory”.
Lorenzo Flabbi
Lorenzo Flabbi was born in Milan and lives in Rome, where he founded and directs L’orma together with Marco Federici Solari. A literary critic, editor and translator, he has taught Comparative Literature at the University of Paris III and Limoges, devoting himself in particular to the theoretical aspects of translation. Among the authors he translated: Apollinaire, Rushdie, Valery, Rimbaud, Stendhal. For his translations of Annie Ernaux, he has received prestigious awards including the Stendhal Prize and the “La Lettura – Corriere della Sera” prize for the best translation of the year 2018.
