BFM TV INFO. The publisher Gallimard has ordered nearly a million reprints of the author’s books, which are snapping up in bookstores (and at gold prices on the Internet) since the Nobel Prize was awarded last Thursday.
At Place out of stock on Amazon, one to two months waiting to get Years or The Event, Empty Cabinets available in only five Parisian bookstores… Since the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Annie Ernaux last Thursday, her books have been snapped up in bookstores and on the Internet. The Syndicate of bookstores evokes a multiplication of sales by ten over the last six days. So much so that its publisher Gallimard has launched the reprint of 900,000 copies, according to our information.
The stakes are enormous; as the publishing house has already observed with JMG Le Clézio in 2008 then Patrick Modiano in 2014, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to an author corresponds to a fourfold increase in sales. Once the challenge of finding emergency paper had been met, the publisher therefore launched this almost million reprints, with the aim of covering demand until the end of the year celebrations.
“The same evening, we had nothing left”
Unlike a Goncourt, whose finalists are known, the deliberations of the Nobel Academy are held in total opacity. In fact, it is impossible for a publisher to anticipate the enthusiasm of the public – this year, it was the French author Michel Houellebecq who was the big favourite.
So, as of Thursday, Annie Ernaux’s book stocks began to run out. This is what Elodie Murzi, deputy director of the Ici à Paris bookstore, observed:
“From the announcement on Thursday, we had a lot of requests. Annie Ernaux has a fairly extensive work, so we always have something to do. But from the very evening of the appointment, we had nothing left.”
Crazy prices on the web
And on resale sites, the happy owners of Annie Ernaux’s novels are having a blast. You can find a copy of the Young man at 1000 euros, an autographed book at 300…
Annie Ernaux has produced, through an essentially autobiographical work, an x-ray of the intimacy of a woman who has evolved with the upheavals of French society since the post-war period.
Renaudot Prize in 1984 for At Place and finalist for the prestigious international Booker Prize in 2019, this professor of literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise has written around twenty stories in which she dissects the weight of class domination and love passion, two themes that have marked her itinerary. of a woman torn because of her popular origins.