Kim Thuy, Dany Laferrière, Julie Doucet… Five successful Canadian writers

Kim Thuy

At 53, Kim Thuy has already had several lives. First in Saigon, which she fled at the age of 10 – like many others boat people – to join a refugee camp in Malaysia, then in Granby (Quebec), where the family settled. After linguistics, she studied law and worked as a lawyer… before running a restaurant in Montreal. So many experiences that inspire the author. Her first novel, Ru (2009), nourished by her journey as a refugee, quickly became a bestseller. In particular, he won the RTL-Lire grand prize at the Paris Book Fair in 2010. Man (2013) and vi (2016). His latest book, Em (2020), does not escape the questioning of exile and uprooting either.

Dany Laferriere

Elected to the French Academy in 2013, Dany Laferrière was born in 1953 in Port-au-Prince. He fled the Duvalier dictatorship in 1976 to settle in Montreal, where he became a worker, then a literary and political columnist. His first book, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se tireur (1985) satirizes racist stereotypes, gaining him notice for his provocative writing style. In 2009, he received the Prix Médicis for L’Énigme du retour. Always close to Haiti, he will testify in Everything is moving around me about the earthquake of January 2010. But his attachment to Quebec also inspires him Everything that we will not tell you, Mongo (2015), 300 pages described as a long love letter to the province (and a list of tips for fitting in). In 2018, he published his first drawn novel, Autoportrait de Paris avec chat, followed, among others, by L’Exil faut le voyage (2020).

Joseph Boyden

Of his Scottish, Irish and, according to him, Native American roots, Joseph Boyden, born in Toronto in 1966, prefers the latter, to the point of wearing his hair in the Iroquois style in high school. His first novel, The Path of Souls (Three Day Road), is a historical fiction on the journey of two young Cree, volunteers during the First World War and inspired by that, very real, of Francis Pegahmagabow, a multi-decorated Ojibwe soldier. The book, the first in a trilogy, earned him the Amazon prize in 2006. This was followed by Les Saisons de la solitude (Through Black Spruce, 2008), hailed by Jim Harrison and the Giller, Canada’s greatest literary prize, then Dans le great circle of the world (The Orenda, 2013). Between beauty and violence, this family saga also tells that of the Indians of the North American continent.

Michael Ondaatje

Multiculturalism, the taste for others, the return to the native land and to that of childhood permeate the work of Michael Ondaatje, born in 1943 in Colombo (Sri Lanka). Immigrated to England, then to Canada, he first became a poet, then a writer. Outlaw Billy the Kid in 1971 and musician Buddy Bolden in 1976 inspire him, but it’s with his novel The English Patient that he won the prestigious British Booker Prize in 1992, a first for a Canadian. He then became known worldwide through the film of the same name, in 1996. His novel Anil’s Ghost (2000) was crowned with the Giller Prize and then by the Foreign Medici. So many successes that give him “freedom”, he says, even if he continued for years to devote himself to teaching and to work for the literary magazine Brick.

Julie Doucet

Grand Prix of the Angoulême Festival 2022 for all of her work, Julie Doucet, born in 1965 in Montreal and trained in graphic arts, started in the 1990s in very personal fictions – sometimes crude – drawn with felt-tip pen black. They first take the form of bilingual fanzines that the author prints and distributes herself, then of comics. “An outlet so as not to be invisible,” she explains. The French publishing house L’Association identifies and publishes it. Ten years later, she left comics to devote herself to printed art. Only the attack on Charlie Hebdo, of which she was a faithful reader, will bring her back to the 9th art. An anthology of his comics was published in France in 2021.