Gabriel Osson

Gabriel Osson is a Haitian-Canadian writer and broadcaster, whose novel Le jour se lèvera won the Prix Alain-Thomas from the Salon du livre de Toronto in 2021.[1]

Gabriel Osson
Born	Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Occupation	novelist, poet
Nationality	Haitian-Canadian
Period	2000s-present
Notable works	Le jour se lèvera

Originally from Port-au-Prince,[1] he is currently based in Toronto, Ontario, where he hosts the weekly world music show Franco découvertes on CHOQ-FM,[2] and serves as president of the Association des auteurs.res de l’Ontario français and founding president of the Association Haïti Futur-Canada.[3]

Osson has published three poetry collections, Efflorescences (2001), Envolées (2009)[4] and D'ici et d'ailleurs (2021),[5] and the travel memoir J’ai marché sur les étoiles: sept leçons apprises sur le chemin de Compostelle (2015).[6] Concurrently with the release D'ici et d'ailleurs, he also released an album of spoken word recitations of the book's poems with musical accompaniment by Dieufaite Charles and Fred Osson.[5]

His debut novel, Hubert le restavèk, was published in 2017,[7] and was followed by Le jour se lèvera in 2020 and Les Voix du chemin in 2021.[5]

In 2019, he was one of 37 Franco-Ontarian writers anthologized in Poèmes de la résistance, a collection of poetry about the controversial cuts to Franco-Ontarian cultural institutions by the government of Doug Ford.[8] In the same year, he was named by Ici Radio-Canada as one of the 25 most significant Black Canadian figures in Franco-Ontarian culture.[2]