Marie-Claire Blais was an acclaimed French-Canadian author known for books including “Une Saison Dans la Vie d’Emmanuel” (“A Season in the Life of Emmanuel”)
- Died: November 30, 2021 (Who else died on November 30?)
- Details of death: Died at her home in Key West, Florida at the age of 82.
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Literary career
Blais published her first novel when she was only 20, in 1959. “Le Belle Bête” (“The Beautiful Beast”) established her reputation as a writer, and she followed it with more than 50 other books over a long and celebrated career. Blais became known for her unusual prose style, including sentences that could go on for dozens of pages, dialogue dropped into the narrative without quotation marks, and entire books written as stream-of-consciousness. She was widely honored as one of Canada’s greatest contemporary authors, winning four prestigious Governor’s General Literary Awards. Her 1966 novel “A Season in the Life of Emmanuel” was her best known book and won the French literary award the Prix Médicis.
Notable quote
“Personally, I don’t like suffering. I prefer serenity. …The world is a terrible place, but we have the tools to change. We have just to wake up.” —from a 2009 interview for the Walrus
Tributes to Marie-Claire Blais
Full obituary: The New York Times
