Le Jeune Homme

Le Jeune Homme, written in the late 1990s, recounts a relationship the author had with a young man thirty years her junior, when she was fifty-four. A student in Rouen, he showed her a devotion she says she had “never before received from a lover”: “with my husband, long ago, I felt like a girl from the working class; with him, this time, I was the bourgeoise.” Ernaux explains how this experience briefly returned her, for several months, to the “scandalous girl” of her youth — a journey back in time that allowed her to reach a decisive stage in her writing.

Five months after its publication, on October 6, 2022, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective constraints of personal memory.” The sixteenth French laureate, and the first woman among them, she is the seventeenth woman to receive the prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

A delicate binding by Louise Bescond.