The Years: (West End Edition)

＂Memory pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.＂

She strikes a pose and the camera shutter clicks... A child playing in the debris of the Second World War. Click. A student discovering parties and men’s bodies. Click. An activist fighting for the right to choose. Click. A wife picking out a velvet sofa. Click. A mother taking her eldest to judo. Click. A lover, seducing a younger man. Click. A grandmother presenting her granddaughter to the camera. Click.

The Years/Les années is Annie Ernaux’s critically acclaimed ＂masterpiece＂ (Guardian), charting a woman’s personal and political life against the backdrop of a rapidly changing post-war Europe.

Annie Ernaux is a French writer who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her works include the 2008 historical memoir Les Années (The Years), which won the Marguerite Duras Prize and the 2016 Strega European Prize. Translated by Alison L. Strayer, The Years was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019, and won the 2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

Eline Arbo is a theatre director. She has been Artistic Director at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam since 2023.

Stephanie Bain is Head of Programming and Literary at the Almeida Theatre, London.