Irish Examiner View: Annie Ernaux is queen of autofiction

Annie Ernaux books, most of them very short, chronicle events in her life and the lives of those around her.

Annie Ernaux poses for a portrait at Festival delle Letterature on June 20, 2016 in Rome, Italy. Picture: Camilla Morandi - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

The Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to the brilliant French writer Annie Ernaux is hugely deserved and a tribute to someone who follows, to the letter, the apocryphal advice that authors should write about what they know.

Ernaux, 82, knows what it is to be a woman in modern Europe, and speaks with an unmatched authority and insight and a lean style which follows Dr Johnson’s maxim: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” 

Many people do not yet know her work. That is about to change.