Marie-Claire Blais

Marie-Claire Blais CC OQ MSRC (5 October 1939 – 30 November 2021) was a Canadian writer, novelist, poet, and playwright from the province of Québec. In a career spanning seventy years, she wrote novels, plays, collections of poetry and fiction, newspaper articles, radio dramas, and scripts for television. She was a four-time recipient of the Governor General’s literary prize for French-Canadian literature, and was also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for creative arts. Some of her works included La Belle Bête (1959), The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange (1968), Deaf to the City (1979), and a ten-volume series Soifs written between 1995 and 2018. Blais was born on 5 October 1939 into a blue collar family in Québec, the daughter of Fernando and Véronique (Nolin) Blais. She was the eldest in a family of five children. She studied at a convent school, but had to interrupt her education at the age of 15 to seek employment as a clerk and later as a typist. At the age of seventeen, she enrolled in a few classes at Université Laval, where she met professor and literary critic Jeanne Lapointe and priest and sociologist Georges-Henri Lévesque, both of whom encouraged her to write. Blais published her first novel La Belle Bête (translated as Mad Shadows) in 1959, when she turned 20. She received a grant from the Canada Council of Arts which allowed her to begin writing full-time. She first moved to Paris and later moved to the United States in 1963 initially living in Cambrid…