interviews
Annie Ernaux: Advice to the Young
“You don’t know before you start what kind of writing you’re going to have.” The Nobel prize recipient in literature 2022, French Annie Ernaux shares her advice to emerging writers. Annie Ernaux advises young writers to ask themselves what they want to write before they begin to write. There are two ways to go, according to Ernaux, “whether it is from their experience or, on the contrary, inventing a world.” Ernaux, who has widely used her own experiences in her work, also empathized that “writing depends on the influences that you may have had” besides your personality.” Annie Ernaux (born 1940) was born Annie Duchesne to a working-class family in Lillebonne, France. Ernaux is known for her lightly fictionalized memoirs written in spare, detached prose. Her work examines her memories, sometimes revisiting and reconstructing events in later works. Themes include her illegal abortion, her troubled marriage, her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s, her love affairs during middle age, and her experience with cancer. Ernaux received the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature for a work described as personal yet universal in depicting a woman living in the 20th and 21st centuries. ‘A Girl’s Story (2020), ‘A Woman’s Story (2003), ‘A Man’s Place (1992), and ‘Simple Passion’ (2003) are among Ernaux’s most acclaimed works. Matthias Dressler-Bredsdorff interviewed Annie Ernaux in May 2023 in Copenhagen.