Annie Ernaux at the Villa Médicis

Annie Ernaux, born in 1940, spent her childhood and adolescence in a small town in Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery in a working-class neighborhood. She began writing while studying literature in Rouen. After becoming a teacher in Haute-Savoie, she published her first novel, Les armoires vides(1974), which describes the heartbreak of social climbing. From La place (1984) onwards, a text dedicated to her father, she made a definitive break with fiction and embarked on an exploration of her lived experience, while seeking new forms of autobiography. The “I” disappears in favor of the “we” and the “on” in Les années, published in 2008, an account of a generation between history and memory, which won the Prix Marguerite-Duras.

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 was born in Milan and now lives in Rome, where he founded and runs L’orma with Marco Federici Solari. Literary critic, editor and translator, he has taught comparative literature at the universities of Paris III and Limoges, focusing in particular on the theoretical aspects of translation. Among the authors he has translated are Apollinaire, Rushdie, Valéry, Rimbaud and Stendhal. For his translations of Annie Ernaux, he has received prestigious awards, including the Prix Stendhal and the “La Lettura – Corriere della Sera” prize for best translation of 2018.