The Young Man by Annie Ernaux

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Annie Ernaux’s most recent book, dazzling and breathtaking, published in France in 2022, is about her affair with a man 30 years her junior.

“A sublime book.” —Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle

“Once again the work of the writer Annie Ernaux appears as both a rigorous study of life and an experiment. These fragments of living, however evanescent, are precious, irreplaceable, like a skin that never fades.” —Caroline Montpetit in Le Devoir

The Young Man is Annie Ernaux’s account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time— together with a sense that she is living her life backwards.

Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the “scandalous girl” she once was, but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing. It was first published in France in 2022.

ANNIE ERNAUX, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, winner of the Prix Renaudot for A Man’s Place, and of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. She is also the winner of the International Strega Prize and the French-American Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for The Years. In 2019 she was the recipient of the Prix Formentor. She is now considered to be France’s most important literary voice, and is the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

ALISON L. STRAYER is a Canadian writer and translator. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, and the Prix litteraire France-Quebec. She lives in Paris.

Author Residence: Paris, France

Author Hometown: Paris, France