Madrid. Annie Ernaux, the French writer and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, has been keeping a diary since she was a child, recording her experiences, thoughts, events, and anxieties. She has done so to this day, even during the dizzying days that followed receiving the prestigious award and transformed her, overnight, into an internationally renowned public figure. The Spanish publishing house Cabaret Voltaire is publishing this updated diary, which includes 120 photographs from her personal album, under the title Escribir la vida: Fotodiario (Writing Life: Photo Diary ).
The Spanish edition of the text, first published in France four years ago, is updated, including images, to 2023. In the book, she explains the meaning of these writings, which have accompanied her throughout her life and, in some cases, have served as a starting or ending point for some of her most celebrated novels. “Instead of a biography, which often leaves a disappointing impression due to its factual nature, I preferred the union of two personal documents: the photo album and the diary, a kind of photojournal. In contrast to the photographs of people and places that have had and continue to have meaning for me in different ways—in my life, in my writing—I have included excerpts from my diary. A way of discovering a different autobiographical space, thus associating the irrefutable material reality of the photographs (whose succession creates history by tracing a social trajectory) and the subjective reality of the diary, with dreams, obsessions, the raw expression of emotions, and the constant revaluation of past experiences,” he explains in the book.
Ernaux was born in Lillebonne (Normandy) in 1940, but spent her childhood and adolescence in Yvetot until moving to Rouen to pursue university studies in literature. She has dedicated her life to teaching French literature.
She is the author of an essentially autobiographical and intimate work, with titles such as Empty Cupboards (1974), What They Say or Nothing (1977), The Frozen Woman (1981), A Woman (1987), Diary of the Outside (1993), I Haven't Left My Night (1997), Getting Lost (2001), The Occupation (2002), Writing Like a Knife (2003), The Use of Photography (2005), The Years (2008), The Other Daughter (2011), Look at the Lights, My Love (2014), Girl's Memory (2016) and The Young Man (2022).
