Madeleine Monette

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 (Québec Academy of Letters) in 2007.

Monette has published several novels: Le Double suspect (1980, Robert-Cliche Award), Petites Violences (1982), Amandes et melon (1991), La Femme furieuse (1997) and Les Rouleurs (2007). 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 (in Québec), Tessera and Virages (in English Canada), Americas' Society Review, Beacons, Women in French Studies, and Romance Language Annual (in the United States), Europe, Sud and Riveneuve-Continents (in France), and L'Immaginazione (in Italy).

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.

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 (United States), the Prix France-Québec Philippe-Rossillon (France), the Prix Molson and Prix Ringuet de l'Académie des Lettres du Québec and the Prix Elle Québec (Canada). 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.[1] Many studies, essays, and theses on her work appeared in North America and in Europe, including a collective entitled Relectures de Madeleine Monette (Summa Publications, Alabama, USA, 1999). 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.

She is a member of the P.E.N. American Center of New York,[2] the Centre québécois du P.E.N. international and the Union des écrivaines et écrivains québécois (UNEQ).[3]

In 2007, she was received into the Académie des lettres du Québec.[4]

• Robert-Cliche Award (1980)[5]
• Gabrielle Roy Writing Grant (1994)
• Writer in Residence at UQAM – Université du Québec à Montréal (1994)
• Member of the Académie des lettres du Québec (2007)

• Gould, Karen, "Translating 'America' in Madeleine Monette's Petites Violences", in Textual Studies/Etudes textuelles au Canada, n° 5, 1994.
• Gould, Karen "Rewriting 'America': Violence, Postmodernity, and Parody in the Fiction of Madeleine Monette, Nicole Brossard and Monique LaRue" in Postcolonial Subjects (Francophone Women Writers), University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
• Gould, Karen, "Madeleine Monette, 'Otherness', and Cultural Criticism", in Women by Women, edited by Roseanna Lewis Dussault, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997, p. 241–251.
• Hill, Sydney Margaret, "She must write her self": Feminist poetics of deconstruction and inscription (six Canadian women writing), Carleton University (Canada), 1998, 121 p.
• Ireland, Susan, "The Reader as Writer in Madeleine Monette's Le Double suspect", in Continental, Latin-American and Francophone Women Writers, ed. by G. Adamson and E. Myers, vol. IV, University Press of America, Maryland, 1997, pp. 269–276.
• Raoul, Valérie, "Gender Confusion and Self-Generation 1960–1990", in Distinctly Narcissistic, Diary Fiction in Quebec, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1996.
• Cannon, Margaret, Review of Doubly Suspect, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, 28 April 2001
• Stos, C. "Madeleine Monette. Doubly Suspect." Canadian Book Review Annual, July 2001, p. 156.
• Joubert, Lucie, "Monette(s)", Spirale, Nov./Dec., 1997, p. 28.

• Madeleine Monette
• Milk of the sky
• Little
• Panic Body