Marie-Claire Blais (1939–2021)

Marie-Claire Blais was born to a working class family in Québec, Canada. She attended a convent school, but had to interrupt her education at age 15 to work, first as a clerk and later as a typist. At 17, she enrolled in a few classes at Laval University, where she met professor and literary critic Jeanne Lapointe and priest and sociologist Georges-Henri Lévesque, both of whom encouraged her to write.
Her debut novel, La belle bête (English translation: Mad Shadows) was published in 1959, when she was 20. It was quickly followed by Tête blanche in 1960. She received a grant from the Canada Council of Arts that allowed her to begin writing full-time, and she moved to Paris and later to the USA. Literary critic Edmund Wilson introduced her to artists and writers in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, including feminist Barbara Deming and writer and painter Mary Meigs. The three lived together in Wellfleet for six years. Blais was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and in 1975, moved back to Canada. For about 20 years she divided her time between Québec and Key West, Florida. Many of her novels were adapted for other formats: La belle bête was made into a ballet by the National Ballet of Canada in 1977 and into a film in 1976. Others made into movies included Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1973); Le sourd dans la ville (Deaf to the City, 1987); and L'océan (1971).

She wrote a 10-volume series starting with Soifs (1995), translated into English as These Festive Islands, set in an island town modeled on Key West and her varied friends and acquaintances there. She had a devoted readership in the French language and won four Canadian Governor General's Literary Awards in her career.

In addition to her novels, she wrote several plays, collections of poetry, newspaper articles, radio dramas, and scripts for television.