Annie Ernaux

Born above her parents' café-grocery in Yvetot, Ernaux crossed France's sharpest border, the one between classes, by way of a teaching degree, and has spent her career going back over the crossing. Cleaned Out (1974) began it with the abortion the law then forbade her to name; A Man's Place and A Woman's Story autopsied, with a daughter's guilt, the parents her education taught her to see from outside.

She calls her method écriture plate, flat writing: no metaphor, no absolution, the diary and the photograph treated as evidence. The Years (2008) scaled it to a whole generation: sixty years of French life narrated by a 'we' from which the 'I' has almost vanished. The 2022 Nobel confirmed what her readers already knew: the scandalously personal had become the collective record.