Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant was one of the 20th century's greatest practitioners of the short story. After working as a journalist for the Montreal Standard, Gallant made the audacious decision in 1950 to move permanently to Paris and survive solely by her literary fiction.

Over the next five decades, she published more than 110 short stories in The New Yorker, chronicling expatriate displacement, postwar European memory, and the bittersweet humor of ordinary lives. Her collections, including The Pegnitz Junction and Home Truths (which won the Governor General's Award), earned her the Matt Cohen Award and Companion of the Order of Canada.