I Will Write To Avenge My People: The Nobel Lecture

Published in book form for the first time, Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm in December 2022, translated by Alison L. Strayer.

‘Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation.’
— Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

‘Her work attests to the ways in which an individual story is linked to shared histories and her documentation of personal oppression is part of a struggle for collective freedom.’
— Jessica Andrews, Elle UK

‘I will write to avenge my people.’ It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defence of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on 7 December 2022. To write of her own life, she asserts, is to ‘shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed’; to mine individual experience is to find collective emancipation. Ernaux’s speech is a bold assertion of the capacity of writing to give people a sense of their own worth, and of one writer’s commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys and its injustices.

• | Author: Annie Ernaux, Alison L. Strayer
• | Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• | Publication Date: Jul 04, 2023
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language: eng
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781804270707
• | ISBN-10: 1804270709