1. Marie-Claire Blais was a four-time recipient of the Governor General's literary prize for French-Canadian literature, and was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for creative arts.
15 Facts About Marie-Claire Blais
1. 2.
Marie-Claire Blais was the eldest in a family of five children.
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Marie-Claire Blais studied at a convent school, but had to interrupt her education at the age of 15 to seek employment as a clerk and later as a typist.
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Marie-Claire Blais published her first novel La Belle Bete in 1959, when she turned 20.
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Marie-Claire Blais received a grant from the Canada Council of Arts which allowed her to begin writing full-time.
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Marie-Claire Blais first moved to Paris and later moved to the United States in 1963 initially living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, then in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
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Marie-Claire Blais was helped by American literary critic Edmund Wilson who introduced her to artists and writers in Cape Cod including feminist Barbara Deming and writer and painter Mary Meigs.
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Edmund Wilson 8.
Marie-Claire Blais remained a longtime partner of Mary Meigs until Meigs' death in 2002.
9.
Marie-Claire Blais won the Governor General's Prize in Canada for two of her novels, The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange and Deaf to the City.
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Marie-Claire Blais sponsored the Prix litteraire Quebec-France Marie-Claire-Blais starting in 2005; awarded annually to a French author for their debut novel.
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Marie-Claire Blais enjoyed an ardent readership in French language literature and had won four Governor General's Literary Awards throughout her career.
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Marie-Claire Blais's works had characters that included delinquent children, wayward nuns and abusive priests and included issues like white supremacy, nuclear holocaust, and the AIDS epidemic.
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Marie-Claire Blais's books included suffering as recurring themes, though she herself had noted in an interview that she preferred serenity to suffering.
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Marie-Claire Blais was a longtime partner of American writer and painter Mary Meigs.
15.
Marie-Claire Blais died on November 30,2021, in Key West, Florida.