Annie Ernaux, née Duchesne, was born in 1940 in Lillebonne Normandy. A few years later her parents moved to Yvetot, where they kept a café and grocery shop in a working-class district of the town. She studied at a private Catholic secondary school in Yvetot, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time. In 1958, at eighteen, she left home for the summer to look after children in a summer camp (colonie de vacances).

Her works overall have received the French language prize and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize, as well as publication of her almost complete works to date in the Quarto edition by Gallimard in 2011 (Ernaux is the first woman writer to be published in this series in her lifetime). In 2014 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cergy-Pontoise.