Novelist, playwright and poet, MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS has been an important figure on the French literary scene for more than thirty-five years. Her first novel, La belle bête, published in 1959, has become a Quebec teaching classic. Since then, she has published some 20 novels in Quebec and in France, all of them translated into English, as well as seven plays and four collections of poems. She also wrote the screenplay Le journal en images froides and contributed to the script of the documentary Tu as crié let me go by director Anne-Claire Poirier. Some of her novels have been adapted for film and television. She has won several prestigious awards, including the Médicis award, and was honoured with the Order of Canada and the Ordre national du Québec, and also made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres de France and Chevalier of the National Order of Merit, appointed by the President of the French Republic. She is also a member of the Académie royale de langue et de littérature française de Belgique, making her the first Quebec author to be inducted into a European literary academy.

Last update 28.04.2008