Marie-Claire Blais


Marie-Claire Blais, is a French Canadian writer, novelist, poet, and playwright from the province of Quebec.

Early life and education

Blais was born to a blue collar family in Quebec City. She studied at a convent school, but had to interrupt her education to seek employment. At the age of seventeen, she enrolled in a few classes at Université Laval, where she met Jeanne Lapointe and Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, who encouraged her to write.
She published her first novel La Belle Bête in 1959, when she turned 20. She has since written more than 20 novels, several plays, collections of poetry and fiction, as well newspaper articles. With the support of the American critic Edmund Wilson, she was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships.
In 1963, she moved to the United States, initially living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, then in Wellfleet, where she lived with Barbara Deming and her partner, American artist Mary Meigs. In 1975, after two years of living in Brittany, she moved back to Quebec. For about twenty years she divided her time between Montreal, the Eastern Townships of Quebec and Key West, Florida, where she maintains her permanent home. She has also obtained American citizenship.
In 1972 she became a Companion of the Order of Canada. Three of her books have been adapted for the cinema: Une Saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, La Belle Bête and Le Sourd dans la ville. Hussain won the Director's Award at the Boston Underground Film Festival for his work.
2002-2003: Universite de Montreal.
Since 2005, she has sponsored the ; awarded annually to a French author.
In January, 2018, she published Une réunion près de la mer, the final novel in a ten-volume series called Soifs, which she had been working on since 1995. It involves life in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and has a complexly interlocked cast of over 200 characters. It is also notable for its experimental nature, which involves the avoidance of paragraphs and chapters, with very long sentences punctuated by commas.

Works