Marie-Claire Blais

Leaving school at fifteen to work in shoe factories, Blais wrote her explosive debut novel, La Belle Bête (Mad Shadows), at age twenty, championing psychological intensity and winning the support of American critic Edmund Wilson.

In 1965, her masterpiece Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, depicting rural poverty through the eyes of an infant in a sixteen-child family, won the Prix Médicis in Paris. A four-time Governor General's Literary Award winner, she spent her final decades writing her monumental Soifs cycle.