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Date of birth: Place of birth:
Calling:
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Photo : Studio Zarov avec la permission de Les éditions Boréal
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When Gabrielle Roy was very
young, her father was the agent responsible for
settling new immigrants when they arrived in the
Canadian West. His work brought him into contact
with people of many different cultures. In 1913 he
lost his job a few months before he would have
qualified for retirement, plunging the family into
dire straits. It was from this experience that she
drew her passionate concern for the poverty and the
struggle for existence of the characters in her
novels.
Gabrielle Roy won a number of
prizes at school for academic excellence, and these
enabled her to pay for further education. In 1929
she obtained her teaching certificate from the
Winnipeg Normal School, and began a brief but happy
time as a teacher. In 1937, to her mother's great
displeasure, she left home to study theatre in
England and France. When war broke out in Europe,
she moved to Montreal to live by her writing. She
worked as a freelance for a number of newspapers
until, in 1945, she published Bonheur d'occasion
(The Tin Flute) and was recognized as an author of
unusual gifts. It was the start of a prolific
career in the course of which she published an
avalanche of books and received a cascade of awards
and honours. In 1947, the year she married Dr
Marcel Cabotte, Bonheur d'occasion earned Gabrielle
Roy the Prix Fémina, a medal from the
Académie canadienne-française and the
Governor General's Award for the English
translation of her first novel. She and her husband
lived in France for three years, where she wrote
her favourite novel, La petite poule d'eau (Where
Nests the Water Hen), published in 1950. She
received the Governor General's Award again for Rue
Deschambault (Street of Dreams) (1955) and Ces
enfants de ma vie (Children of My Heart) (1977). In
1956, she was awarded the Prix Duvernay for her
achievements so far; she also received the Prix
Athanase-David in 1970, the Molson and Gibson
awards in 1978, and the Canada Council's prize for
children's literature for Courte-Queue (Cliptail)
in 1980. Gabrielle Roy was a member of the Royal
Society of Canada from 1947 on and an honorary
member of the Union des écrivaines et
écrivains québécois from 1977
on.
In 1952, Gabrielle Roy and
her husband returned to Quebec where, in 1967, they
bought a cottage in
Petite-Rivière-Saint-François. She
spent all her summers there and did a good part of
her writing there as well. On July 13, 1983, she
died of a heart attack. Her autobiography, La
Détresse et l'enchantement (Enchantment and
Sorrow), was published in 1984.
The recognition won by
Gabrielle Roy's immense talent opened new vistas
for francophone writers in Canada. Romantic or
autobiographical, her novels describe with warmth
the lives of poor and simple people in the towns
and villages where she spent her life.
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