Nicole Brossard
Biography
Montreal-born Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist and essayist, twice Governor General Award winner for her poetry (1974, 1984), member of l'Académie des lettres du Québec and of La société royale du Canada, is one of Quebec's most celebrated authors. For the more than thirty books she has published since 1965, she has received the Prix Athanase-David (1991), the highest prize in Quebec, for her entire body of work, and the Molson Prize of the Canada Council (2006), the most prestigious award in Canada, for her outstanding contribution to the arts and humanities. Her many honours and awards from both francophone and anglophone institutions in Canada include doctorates from the University of Western Ontario (1991) and the Université de Sherbrooke (1997), the bp Nichol Chapbook Award (1986), le Grand Prix de Poésie du Festival international de Trois-Rivières (1989, 1999), the Harbourfront Festival Prize (1991), Prix de la Société des écrivains canadiens (2002) and the W.O. Mitchell Prize (2003). Nicole Brossard emerged as a leading figure of the new literary movement which since the 1960s has revolutionized the forms and language of poetry and fiction in Quebec through her work as founding co-editor of the influential periodical La barre du jour (1965–1975) and of the feminist periodical Les têtes de pioche (1976–1979) and through her contribution to feminist culture, confirmed with the film Some American Feminists (1976), the acclaimed Anthologie de la poésie des femmes au Québec (1991, 2003), and her role as President of the Third International Feminist Book Fair (1988). Through her many appearances as speaker or reader at conferences and festivals across Canada and throughout the world, Brossard has significantly influenced contemporary writing internationally, especially through the many translations of her work into English and Spanish, and those of individual works into German, Italian, Slovenian, Romanian, Japanese and Afrikaans. Titles translated into English include Aerial Letter, Baroque at Dawn, The Blue Books, Intimate Journal, Installations, Lovhers, Mauve Desert, Museum of Bone and Water, These Our Mothers. L'Horizon du fragment (2004, Ed. Trois-Pistoles) and Yesterday at the Hotel Clarendon (2005, Coach House Books, S. de Lotbinière Harwood, trans) are her most recent books in French and English. Fluid Arguments, a selection of her recent essays by various translators was edited by Susan Rudy in 2006 (Mercury) as was a new edition of the translation of Picture Theory (Guernica, B. Godard trans.). Nicole Brossard: Essays on her Work (Guernica), edited by Louise Forsyth, appeared in 2005. Nicole Brossard has just completed a new novel in French, and a selection of her poetry in English translation will be published by the University of California Press in 2007–2008.