Marie-Claire Blais

Blais was born on 5 October 1939 into a blue collar family in Québec, the daughter of Fernando and Véronique (Nolin) Blais.[1][2] She was the eldest in a family of five children.[3] 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.[3] 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.[3]

Blais published her first novel La Belle Bête (translated as Mad Shadows) in 1959, when she turned 20.[4] She received a grant from the Canada Council of Arts which allowed her to begin writing full-time.[3] She first moved to Paris and later moved to the United States in 1963 initially living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, then in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.[2] She was also helped by American literary critic Edmund Wilson who introduced her to artists and writers in Cape Cod including feminist Barbara Deming and writer and painter Mary Meigs. The three lived together in Wellfleet for six years. Blais remained a longtime partner of Mary Meigs until Meigs' death in 2002.[3]

During this time, Blais was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships.[2] In 1975, after two years of living in Brittany, France, she moved back to Québec. For about twenty years she divided her time between Montréal, the Eastern Townships of Québec and Key West, Florida, where she maintained her permanent home.[5]

In 1972, she became a Companion of the Order of Canada.[2] Many of her works have been adapted for other formats: La belle bête was made into a ballet by the National Ballet of Canada in 1977. The same book was made into a movie by Karim Hussain in 1976.[2] Hussain won the Director's Award at the Boston Underground Film Festival for his work. Some of Blais' other works that were made into movies included Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (Claude Weisz, 1973), which won the Prix de la Quinzaine des jeunes réalisateurs at the Cannes Film Festival, Le sourd dans la ville (Mireille Dansereau, 1987), which won an award at the Venice Film Festival, and L'océan (Jean Feuchère, 1971).[2]

Blais won the Governor General's Prize in Canada for two of her novels, The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange (1968) and Deaf to the City (1979).[3] She also wrote a 10-volume series starting with Soifs (1995) (transl. Thirstings) translated into English as These Festive Islands. The series was set in an island town modeled on Key West and featured an interlocked cast of over a hundred characters including drag queens, painters, writers, and barflies, many of them based on acquaintances that she had made on the island where she had been a part of a community that included a journalist and novelist John Hersey and poet James Merrill. The writing was based on long sentences described as 'meandering' with a combination rapidly shifting between characters' internal monologues and dialogues. The books were written in a 'stream-of-consciousness' style, with no chapters and no paragraph breaks. The last book in the 10-volume series Une réunion près de la mer was published in 2018.[3][6]

She sponsored the Prix littéraire Québec-France Marie-Claire-Blais starting in 2005; awarded annually to a French author for their debut novel.[2]

Blais enjoyed an ardent readership in French language literature and had won four Governor General's Literary Awards through her career. Writing in an article in Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, literary critic Jade Colbert called her "the 21st century Virginia Woolf" while Quebec novelist Michel Tremblay called her "one of our greatest national treasures".[3][7]

In addition to her novels, Blais has written several plays, collections of poetry and fiction, newspaper articles, radio dramas, and scripts for television. Her works had characters that included delinquent children, wayward nuns and abusive priests and included issues like white supremacy, nuclear holocaust, and the AIDS epidemic.[3] Her books included suffering as recurring themes, though she herself had noted in an interview that she preferred serenity to suffering.[8]

Blais was a longtime partner of American writer and painter Mary Meigs. Meigs predeceased her in 2002.[3]

Blais died 30 November 2021, in Key West, Florida.[9][10]

Source:[2][11][12]

Source:[2]

• Prix France-Canada – 1965
• Prix Médicis – 1966
• Prix Athanase-David – 1982
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada – 1986
• Ludger-Duvernay Prize – 1988
• Governor General's Literary Award – 1996
• Prix d'Italie – 1999
• W. O. Mitchell Literary Prize – 2000
• Prix Prince Pierre de Monaco – 2002
• Matt Cohen Prize – 2006

• "Marie-Claire Blais" in Canadian Writers, an examination of archival manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, journals and notebooks at Library and Archives Canada
• Office of the Governor General of Canada. Order of Canada citation. Queen's Printer for Canada.
• Weightman, John (29 January 1960) "Fiction in France" Review section The Observer

• "Marie-Claire Blais" in The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Archives of Marie-Claire Blais (Fonds Marie-Claire Blais, R11710) are held at Library and Archives Canada (in French)
• Marie-Claire Blais at IMDb
• Chiasson, Paul (1 December 2021). "Marie-Claire Blais, celebrated novelist and playwright, dies at 82". The Globe and Mail. The Canadian Press. Retrieved 1 September 2022.