(A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL Mavis Gallant is a cont...)
A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL Mavis Gallant is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker for close to fifty years who has, in the words of The New York Times, "radically reshaped the short story for decade after decade." Michael Ondaatje's new selection of Gallant's work gathers some of the most memorable of her stories set in Europe and Paris, where Gallant has long lived. Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. Together they compose a secret history, at once intimate and panoramic, of modern times.
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Gallant was born on 11 August in 1922 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She was the only child of Albert Stewart Roy de Trafford Young, a Canadian furniture salesman, and painter who was the son of an officer in the British Army, and his wife, Benedictine Wiseman. Young died in 1932 of kidney disease, and his wife soon remarried and moved to New York, leaving their daughter behind with a guardian.
Doctoral (honorary), University St. Anne, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1984. Doctoral (honorary), York University, Toronto, 1984. Doctoral (honorary), University Western Ontario, 1990.
Doctoral (honorary), Queen's University, 1992. Doctoral (honorary), University Montreal, 1995. Doctoral (honorary), Bishop's University, 1995.
Acclaimed for her mastery of the short story, her first published work appeared in Canadian publications such as Preview (1944) and Northern Review (1950).
Gallant's many stories are unsentimental, wry, and meticulously observed, with touches of dry humor; they feature exquisitely detailed characters, whether homebodies or expatriates, in clearly delineated settings.
Among her story collections are The Other Paris (1956), My Heart Is Broken (1964), From the Fifteenth District (1979), Home Truths (1981), In Transit (1988), Across the Bridge (1993), Paris Stories (2002), and Montreal Stories (2004).
Her Collected Stories was published in 1996, Selected Stories the following year.
Gallant also wrote two novels, Green Water, Green Sky (1959) and A Fairly Good Time (1970); one play, What Is to Be Done? (1982); and many pieces of nonfiction, including those collected in Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (1986).
She only rarely granted interviews until 2006, when she participated in two television documentaries: one in English for Bravo! Canada, Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant, and one in French as part of the series CONTACT, l'encyclopédie de la création, hosted by Canadian broadcaster Stéphan Bureau.
Mavis Gallant is remembered as the author of famous From the Fifteenth District, The Pegnitz Junction, Home Truths.
In 1981, Gallant was named an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature. She was promoted to Companion of the Order in 1993.
In 2000, Gallant won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as a PEN/Nabokov Award.
On November 8, 2006, Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David from the government of her native province of Quebec. She was the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.
(A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL Mavis Gallant is a cont...)
Quotes from others about the person
In a review of her work in Books in Canada in 1978, Geoff Hancock asserts that “Mavis Gallant's fiction is among the finest ever written by a Canadian. But, like buried treasure, both the author and her writing are to discover. ” In the Canadian Reader, Robert Fulford writes, “One begins comparing her best moments to those of major figures in literary history. Names like Henry James, Chekhov, and George Eliot dance across the mind. ”
Mavis Gallant married to John Gallant, a Winnipeg musician, in 1942. The couple divorced in 1947.
