$3000.00 marketing and publicity budget
Novelist and playwright Réjean Ducharme was
born in Saint-Félix-de-Valois, in the region of Joliette, Quebec in
1941. He spent seven months in the Canadian Air Force in 1962, then
worked as a salesman, office clerk and cab driver before travelling
across Canada, the United States and Mexico for three years. Ten of
his works have been published by Gallimard which is quite an
accomplishment, given the prestige of this French publishing
company. His first novel, L’Avalée des avalées The Swallower
Swallowed (1966), won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 1967
and the French CBC’s Canada Reads competition in 2005. For this
work he was one of the nation’s first writers to be nominated for
France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt. His second novel, Le Nez qui
voque (1967), was awarded the Prix littéraire de la province de
Québec. It is published here under the title Miss Take. These two,
plus a third novel, L’Océantume (1968), were published during the
years of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and made a significant
impact. Ducharme wrote the plays, Le Cid maghané and Ines Pérée et
Inat Tendu in 1968, and Ha ha! which won the Governor General’s
Literary Award in 1982 has also been translated into English. He
received the Prix Belgique-Canada in 1973 for L’Hiver de force and
the Prix France-Canada in 1976 for Les Enfantômes. In addition, he
wrote the lyrics of several songs for Robert Charlebois (1976).
Ducharme also wrote the screenplay for two very successful films:
Les Bons Débarras (1979) and Les Beaux Souvenirs (1981) produced by
Francis Mankiewicz. After a fourteen-year silence, Ducharme
surprised the world with two novels, Dévadé (1990) and Va savoir
(1994). Réjean Ducharme is considered one of the most significant
and original voices in Quebec literary history. He has also
exhibited his sculptures and paintings created with found objects,
under the pseudonym Roch Plante. He is not only one of Quebec’s
most influential playwrights, but also one of the province’s
enigmas: the man has not been seen in public for over a decade and
there are few photographs of him. He followed his early work with
other novels including La fille de Christophe Colomb which has
since been adapted for the theatre and translated into English as
The Daughter of Christopher Columbus (Toronto: Guernica Editions,
2000). His play Ha! ha! (1978, Théâtre du Nouveau Monde /TNM,
directed by Jean-Pierre Ronfard ) won him another Governor
General’s Award in 1982 and the Grand Prix littéraire du Journal de
Montréal. Ducharme’s work is very difficult to categorize; it
delights in a kind of dark, childlike fantasy and skates along
difficult issues like Quebec Nationalism, language and culture and,
of course, personal and social identity. He has also written films
and lyrics. In 1994 he won the Quebec Government’s Athanase-David
Literary prize. In 1999 he was awarded the Grand Prix national des
lettres by the minister of culture for France. He sent writer Roger
Grenier to pick up the prize. His novel Gros Mots was published in
2000 by Gallimard. His other plays include: Le Cid maghané
(Festival de Sainte-Agathe, 1968), Le marquis qui perdit (Théâtre
du Nouveau Monde, 1970, directed by André Brassard ), Ines Pérée et
Inat Tendu (Nouvelle Compagnie Théâtrale, 1976). In 2001, TNM
mounted an adaptation of his novel L’Hiver de force as part of the
company’s 50th anniversary celebrations and subsequently toured the
production to Paris.
Will Browning holds a Docorate of Modern Langauges
in French and spanish from Middlebury College, and an MA in spanish
from the Université de Paris. He is currently Professor at Boise
State University. Browning publishes French-language reviews and
articles, in addition to his translation work.
“Forty-four years after Le nez qui voque won the Governor General’s
Award for French fiction, Browning’s is the first English
translation, and it is easy to see why: tackling Ducharme’s writing
is a Herculean undertaking. Yet Browning aims to translate all nine
of Ducharme’s novels, “thereby expanding access to his wonderful,
quirky, inventive prose.” He is rendering Canadian literature a
unique service by opening Ducharme’s work to Anglophone
readers.”
—Canadian Literature
“[Browning] is rendering Canadian literature a unique service by
opening Ducharme’s work to Anglophone readers.”
—Canadian Literature
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