https://books2read.com/u/mKJxdd
https://books2read.com/u/mYgK6x
https://bwlpublishing.ca/donaldson-yarmey-joan/
I am a
proud Canadian author of over twenty fiction and non-fiction books in my long
writing career. But I am just one of thousands of published writers from this
huge country. Canada has had a long and illustrious history of producing world
renown authors and books going all the way back to the 18th century.
Frances
Moore was born in England in 1724. She was a well-known poet and playwright in
England before she and her husband, Reverend John Brooke moved to Quebec City
in 1763, for John to take up the post of army chaplain. During her time there
Frances wrote The History of Emily
Montague, a love story set in the newly formed Quebec province.
The
story is told through the voices of her characters by way of personal letters
between the two. This is known as epistolary (of letters) type of writing and
it was popular during the1700s in Europe. The Brookes’ returned to England in
1768 and the novel was published in 1769 the London bookseller, James Dodsley. The History of Emily Montague was the
first novel written in what is now Canada and the first with a Canadian
setting. Frances died in 1789.
Quebec
Marie-Rose-Emma-Gabrielle Roy was born on March 22, 1909, in Saint Boniface, Manitoba, which is
now part of Winnipeg. After her early education she took teacher training at
the Winnipeg Normal School. She taught in rural schools in Manitoba until she
was appointed to the Institut Collegial Provencher in Saint Boniface. She saved
her money and moved to France and England to study drama but after two years
returned to Canada when WWII broke out in 1939. She settled in Montreal and
earned a living as a sketch artist while writing. She became a freelance
journalist for La Revue Moderne and Le Bulletin des agriculteurs.
Ms. Roy’s first novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945) was an accurate
portrayal of Saint-Henri, a poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Montreal. It was
published in French, earning her the Prix Femina award in 1947. The book was
also published in English under the title The
Tin Flute and won the Governor General Award for fiction as well as the
Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal. It was the first major Canadian
urban novel.
The novel sold almost a million copies in the United States and the
Literary Guild of America made the novel a feature book of the month in 1947.
Because of all the attention the book received, Gabrielle moved to Saint
Boniface to escape the publicity. There she met a doctor, Marcel Carbotte and
three months later, in August, they married. They headed to Paris for the next
three years where Carbotte studied gynecology and Roy wrote. On their return to
Canada in 1950, they settled in Montreal for a couple of years and then moved
to Quebec City. Carbotte took up a position at the Hôpital du Saint-Sacrement
and they lived in an apartment. Wanting a quiet place to write, Grabrielle bought
a cottage in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, Charlevoix County. There she wrote
the bulk of her work. In total, she wrote twenty books.
Gabrielle and her husband didn’t have any children. Besides writing she
travelled around the world and spent time visiting her family.
Gabrielle Roy is considered to be one of the most important Francophone
writers in Canadian history and one of the most influential Canadian authors.
She became a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1967 and won many awards, including
the Governor General Award three times. She was on the panel in 1963 that gave
the Expo ’67, Montreal World's Fair and Canada’s 100th birthday
celebration, its theme: Man and His World (Terre des hommes).
Gabrielle Roy died of a heart attack on July 13, 1983, at the age of
seventy-four. Her autobiography, La Détresse et l'enchantement, was
published posthumously in 1984 and the English translation, Enchantment and Sorrow won the Governor
General Award in 1987.
In 2004 the Government issued a $20.00
bank note in its Canadian Journey Series which had a quotation from her 1961
novel, The Hidden Mountain: Could we ever know each other in the
slightest without the arts?
Mordecai Richler was born on
January 27, 1931, in Montreal, QC. He was raised on St. Urbain Street and
learned how to speak English, French, and Yiddish. He studied at Sir George
Will College (Concordia University) but left before getting a degree. He moved
to Paris at nineteen and lived there for two years before returning to Montreal.
He worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) for a short time then
moved to London, England in 1954 where he married Catherine Boudreau. She was a
non-Jewish French-Canadian divorcee who was nine years older. Just before their
wedding he met and was infatuated by another non-Jewish woman Florence Wood
Mann, who was the wife on his close friend, Stanley Mann.
While in England he wrote and had published seven novels, the most
well-known one being The Apprenticeship
of Duddy Kravitz (1959). The story was about Richler’s favourite theme: the
hardships of Jewish life around St. Urbain Street in Montreal in the 1930s and
1940s. He wrote a screen play for the novel and it was made into a film in 1974
starring Richard Dreyfuss. In 1960 Richler divorced his
wife and Florence divorced her husband and they were married in 1961. Mordecai
adopted her son and they had four more children.
Richler and his family returned to Montreal in 1972. A compilation of
his humorous essays was collected into Notes on an Endangered Species and
Others (1974). He also wrote the Jacob
Two-Two series of children’s fantasy books (1975, 1987, and 1995). His
novel Joshua Then and Now was published in 1980 and made into a film
in 1985.
Besides writing novels, Richler also contributed articles to magazines
such as The Atlantic Monthly, Look, The New Yorker, and The
American Spectator. He wrote a column for The National Post and Montreal’s The Gazette and wrote book reviews for Gentleman’s Quarterly.
His last novel, Barney’s Version (1997) was based on the
events surrounding his divorce and remarriage. Barney’s Version was made into a film in 2010.
Richler was awarded the Order of Canada in 1999. He died of cancer on
July 3, 2001, at the age of 70.
