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Gallant, Mavis

Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal, Canada in 1922. As a young woman whe worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard, married, divorced and then moved to Paris to pursue fiction writing fulltime.

Since 1951, Mavis Gallant has published many stories, most of which first appeared in The New Yorker. In 1981, Gallant recieved the Governor General's award for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 1993 she was raised to the Companion, the Order's highest level. Mavis Gallant is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her more recent Canadian awards include the Molson literary award (1996), the Matt Cohen Award (2001) and a special achievement award from Montreal's Blue Metroplois Literary Festival (2002)

The 2002 Rea Award jurors, Deborah Eisenberg, Alice Munro and Joy Williams, said of Mavis Gallant's writing:

"Mavis Gallant has shown us over and over again what a marvel a short story can be. You can start to read any one of her stories (it does not matter if it is one you have read ten times before) and you are at once swept away -- captivated, amazed, moved -- by the grace of her sentences, the ease of her wit, the suppleness of her narrative, the complexity and originality of her perfectly convincing characters. She is a fearless writer, apparently equal to representing on paper any aspect of mind or time, however subtle, intractable, or evanescent. And the great gift bestowed is that such skills seems less like skill than like magic -- it never makes you stop to admire it, but simply allows you to be carried into the depths of the story, and granted the piercing, powerful, live pleasure, the thrill of capture, which is what we are always hoping for when we take up a work of fiction." Described by The New York Times as having radically reshaped the short story decade after decade," Gallant has contributed tot he short story genre for over half a century. "Her characters do not flee from home; they start out homeless, spending their lives conniving at accommodation with a century that started in horror and is ending in hollowness...Gallant primes us to expect them to be good or bad, but never hints which are which; in her stories tragedy can turn to comedy in a sentence...In a real sense her style and attitude are her message."

In Canada, one of the CBC Radio annual Canada Reads 2008 competition panelists, Lisa Moore, is championing the writing of Mavis Gallant. After finishing a story by Mavis Gallant Lisa Moore said, "How unsentimental. How absolute and true."

Titles written by Mavis Gallant:

Montreal Stories by Mavis Gallant	Florida by Mavis Gallant (Short Fiction Single) narrated by Margot Dionne	The End of the World by Mavis Gallant (Short Fiction Single) narrated by Margot Dionne
The Chosen Husband by Mavis Gallant (Short Fiction Single) narrated by Margot Dionne	In Youth is Pleasure by Mavis Gallant (Short Fiction Single) narrated by Margot Dionne