Do we like them?Do we like Annie Ernaux?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent and on the right side for women and the vulnerable, with one contested position on Israel that her critics call hostile and her defenders call criticism of a state.
Annie Ernaux is the French writer who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her more than 20 books are taught in French schools, and they dig into class and gender through her own life. The Swedish Academy praised the way she uncovers the roots and the collective restraints of personal memory.
The formative thing is class. She grew up working-class and moved into a different social world, and she has talked about that crossing in her own terms, describing herself as a class defector. She told Politis in 2022 that being a “transfuge de classe” meant she had crossed over to the other side. That sense of shame and betrayal runs through her books.
Now the stoush. After her Nobel win, the Jerusalem Post reported that she had signed several letters backing a boycott of Israel, including a 2018 letter opposing the France-Israel cultural season and a 2019 letter urging a Eurovision boycott. It also pointed to a 2021 letter that said “This is not a conflict: this is apartheid.” The Post's writer argued that the letter left out rocket fire from Gaza. She was accused of antisemitism by critics, and the Post article carried no response from her.
The same Post piece highlighted a letter she signed seeking the release of Georges Abdallah, a Lebanese militant serving life for two 1982 killings. The letter called the two dead men “active Mossad and CIA agents”. That is the most uncomfortable item on her record, and the Post flagged it as a problem. It is a signed letter with other names on it, so it is not a speech of her own.
On the harm check, nothing I could open shows her demeaning LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and I found no record of her campaigning against trans people. The record is thin on climate and on LGBTQ+ issues, so I can't say more than that. Where you land on her boycott politics depends on whether you read it as criticism of Israeli government policy, which her defenders do, or as something worse, which her critics say.
In January 2024 she was among more than 500 writers and artists who signed the Strike Germany boycott of German state-funded cultural institutions. Supporters said it protested a crackdown on pro-Palestinian expression. In September 2025 she was one of 20 writers, three of them Nobel laureates, who urged Macron to resume evacuations of Palestinian scholars, artists and writers from Gaza, and called the suspension “collective punishment”.