Madeleine Monette


Madeleine Monette is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, and poet from Quebec. Born in Montreal, she has lived in New York City since 1979. After her first novel, Le Double suspect, won the Prix Robert-Cliche in 1980, she devoted herself to writing novels and short stories that combine an intimate sense of reality with an acute social consciousness, revisiting the social novel and probing at close range the notion of "Americanity", creating works that are cultural multiplexers and whose geography tends to undo the very concept of "territory", physical or imaginary. In 2007, she turned to poetry as another way to explore our subjective and physical relationship to the present world, while keeping a close eye on social reality and the historical moment. Her poems, which channel the sensuality of her novelistic writings, reconsider and renew the art of the narrative, combining fiction and poetry in a singular way. Since the early 1980s, Monette also contributed to promote Quebec and francophone literature in the United States and Europe, and as far as New Caledonia in the South Pacific. She was received into the Académie des lettres du Québec in 2007.

Literary career

Monette has published several novels: Le Double suspect, Petites Violences, Amandes et melon, La Femme furieuse and Les Rouleurs. In 2000, Le Double suspect came out in English under the title Doubly Suspect. Her first book of poetry, Ciel à outrances, appeared in 2013. It was translated into English in 2014 under the title Lashing Skies. Her novel Les Rouleurs was published in 2015 by Galaade Editions in Paris, under the title Skatepark.
Over the years, many of her texts were read on the radio and published in short-story collections such as Histoires de livres, Lignes de métro, Nouvelles d'Amérique, Nouvelles de Montréal, Plages; others, including poems, appeared in literary publications such as Arcade, Code-Barres, Écrits du Canada français, Écrits, Estuaire, Exit, Liberté, Moebius, Nuit blanche, Possibles, Québec français, Le Sabord, Trois and XYZ, Tessera and Virages, Americas' Society Review, Beacons, Women in French Studies, and Romance Language Annual, Europe, Sud and Riveneuve-Continents, and L'Immaginazione.
Monette was writer in residence at the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1993–1994. In 2007, she was writer in residence at the Château de Lavigny International Writers’ Residence in Switzerland, with the support of the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation. In 2007–2008, she was a member of the jury of the Canada-Japan Award and of the Prix Ringuet du roman de l’Académie des lettres du Québec. In 2008–2009, she reviewed American novels on Première Chaîne's Vous m’en lirez tant. Since 2009, as a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec, she is a co-organizer of the annual Quebec session of Femmes-Monde à La Coupole in Paris.
Since 1983 she has toured, given lectures and public readings, taken part in festivals of literature, book fairs, conferences and international meetings of writers in North America, Europe, the Caribbean, and New Caledonia in the South Pacific.

Awards and acknowledgements

Winner of the Robert-Cliche Award in 1980 for her first novel, Le Double suspect, she was also short-listed for literary awards such as the Marguerite Yourcenar Award, the Prix France-Québec Philippe-Rossillon, the Prix Molson and Prix Ringuet de l’Académie des Lettres du Québec and the Prix Elle Québec. She was awarded the first Gabrielle-Roy Writing Grant in 1994, which allowed her to live in Roy's summer house on the St. Lawrence River.
Monette was featured in the literary magazine Lettres québécoises in 2009. Many studies, essays, and theses on her work appeared in North America and in Europe, including a collective entitled Relectures de Madeleine Monette. Thus, recently, an in-depth interview entitled "La Vigilance du roman", together with an essay on Petites Violences and Les Rouleurs, was published in France, by Editions de la Transparence, in La violence au féminin.

Affiliations

She is a member of the P.E.N. American Center of New York, the Centre québécois du P.E.N. international and the Union des écrivaines et écrivains québécois.
In 2007, she was received into the Académie des lettres du Québec.

List of honors

Poetry
Novels
Short Stories/Poems/Excerpts
Essays