A chronicler of experience and a scrutineer of memory, Annie Ernaux always tries to express something universal. By recording her experiences – of the working class, social mobility, abortion, death, divorce, jealousy, affairs, desire, and more – she asks her readers to see their lives in her writing.

Photography is often a tool in this project; Ernaux uses it to interrogate the ways we look back at life and preserve memories. She describes images – be they real, imagined, or lost – and writes scenes as though she were a photographer observing the world and snapping it for posterity. As she suggests in the final lines of her chef-d’œuvre, The Years (2017), she strives to ‘[s]ave something from the time where we will never be again’.