La Presse (Publié le 18 février 2014) L'écrivaine canadienne Mavis Gallant est décédée à l'âge de 91 ans L'écrivaine canadienne Mavis Gallant est décédée à l' âge de 91 ans. Originaire de Montréal, elle avait publié plus d'une centaine de nouvelles et était reconnue internationalement comme un des grands maîtres de ce genre littéraire. Même si elle a vécu à l'étranger, Mavis Gallant a reçu plusieurs honneurs canadiens de haut niveau, dont l'Ordre du Canada et le Prix littéraire du Gouverneur général. Cette nouvelliste, essayiste et romancière a aussi reçu le prix Athanase-David, la plus haute distinction accordée par le gouvernement du Québec dans le domaine des lettres.
Mavis Gallant (Montréal, le 11 août 1922 – Paris, le 18 février 2014) est une écrivaine canadienne. Née à Montréal, elle fréquente plusieurs écoles publiques et privées et quelques pensionnats. Elle travaille ensuite pour le Montreal Standard avant de se consacrer à l'écriture. Elle s'installe à Paris tout en conservant sa citoyenneté canadienne. Elle publie plusieurs œuvres de fiction sur des expatriés, en tentant de montrer l'évolution de leur état d'esprit. Avec Alice Munro, Gallant est l'une des seules canadiennes à écrire régulièrement dans The New Yorker. En raison de sa compréhension intime de la culture acadienne, elle est souvent comparée à Antonine Maillet. La province de Québec a honoré Gallant et son œuvre en 2006.
(Source : Wikipédia)
Le prix Mavis-Gallant (en anglais Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction) est un prix littéraire québécois de langue anglaise. Il a été créé en 1988 par la Quebec Writer’s Federation dans le but d'encourager et de promouvoir la littérature de langue anglaise au Québec. Il est remis à un auteur d'une étude ou d'un essai. (Source : Wikipédia)
Mavis Leslie Gallant, née Young (11 August 1922 – February 2014) was a Canadian writer. An only child, Gallant was born in Montreal, Quebec. Her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried. Gallant received her education at seventeen different public, convent, and French-language boarding schools. In her twenties, she briefly worked for the National Film Board before taking a job as a reporter for the Montreal Standard (1944–1950). She married John Gallant, a Winniped musician, in 1942. The couple divorced five years later in 1947. While working for the Standard, she published some of her early short stories both in the newspaper and in the magazines Preview and Northern Review Gallant left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing full time; her first internationally published short story, "Madeline's Birthday", appeared in The New Yorker in 1951. She has published over 100 stories in The New Yorker since then; alongside Nobel Price Alice Munro, Gallant is one of only a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appear in the magazine. She moved to Europe to facilitate being able to work exclusively as a writer, living briefly in Spain before settling in Paris, France, where she resided for the remainder of her life.
Gallant has written two novels, Green Water, Green Sky (1959) and A Fairly Good Time (1970); a play, What is to be Done? (1984); numerous celebrated collections of stories, The Other Paris (1953), My Heart is Broken (1964), The Pegnitz Junction (1973), The End of the World and Other Stories (1974), Across the Bridge (1976), From the Fifteenth District (1978), Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris (1985), and In Transit (1988); and a non-fiction work, Paris Journals: Selected Essays and Reviews (1986). Across the Bridge (1993) was her final published volume of new short stories, although numerous new collections of her previously published stories were published in the 1990s and 2000s. Throughout her early career, Canadian literary critics often wrote of Gallant as being unfairly overlooked in Canada because of her expatriate status; this criticism reached its peak in 1979 when From the Fifteenth District, widely regarded as her greatest work, failed to even garner a shortlisted nomination for the 1979 Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction. In response to the criticism, her Canadian publisher prepared Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories, a volume of previously published stories selected to highlight the Canadian themes and settings present in her work; that volume did win the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction in 1981. In 1981, Gallant was named an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature. She was promoted to Companion of the Order in 1993. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada to be the writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. in 1991. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 she received the rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as a PEN/Nabokov Award. She only rarely granted interviews until 2006, when she participated in two television documentaries: one in English for Bravo! Television, Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant, and one in French, as part of the series CONTACT, l'encyclopédie de la création, hosted by Canadian broadcaster Stéphan Bureau. Gallant was honored at Symphony Space in New York City on November 1, 2006, in an event for Selected Shorts—fellow authors Russell Banks, Jhumpa Lahiri and Michael Ondaatje honoured her and read excerpts from her work, and Gallant herself made a rare personal appearance, reading one of her short stories in its entirety. On November 8, 2006, Gallant received the Prix-Athanase-David from the government of her native province of Quebec. She was the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence. Gallant's private journals are slated for future publication by McClelland and Stewart and Knofp, with the first volume expected to cover the period from 1952 to 1969. Gallant was candid about her need for autonomy and privacy. In an interview with Geoff Hancock in Canadian Fiction magazine in 1978, she discussed her “life project” and her deliberate move to France to write by saying, “I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It's what I like doing.” In the preface to her collection of stories, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), she used the words of Boris Pasternak as her epigraph: “Only personal independence matters.” Critical assessment
Grazia Merler observes in her book, Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices, that “Psychological character development is not the heart of Mavis Gallant’s stories, nor is plot. Specific situation development and reconstruction of the state of mind or of heart is, however, the main objective.” Frequently, Gallant’s stories focus on expatriate men and women who have come to feel lost or isolated; marriages that have grown flimsy or shabby; lives that have faltered and now hover in the shadowy area between illusion, self-delusion, and reality. Because of her heritage and understanding of Acadian history, she is often compared to Antonine Maillet, considered to be a spokesperson for Acadian culture in Canada. In her critical book Reading Mavis Gallant, Janice Kulyk Keefer says, “Gallant is a writer who dazzles us with her command of the language, her innovative use of narrative forms, the acuity of her intelligence, and the incisiveness of her wit. Yet she also disconcerts us with her insistence on the constrictions and limitations that dominate human experience.” In a review of her work in Books in Canada in 1978, Geoff Hancock asserts that “Mavis Gallant's fiction is among the finest ever written by a Canadian. But, like buried treasure, both the author and her writing are to discover.” In the Canadian Reader, Robert Fulford has said, “One begins comparing her best moments to those of major figures in literary history. Names like Henry James, Chekhov and George Eliot dance across the mind.” (Source : Wikipédia)
