This page covers literary works in English (fiction, drama, and poetry) about or by authors from Quebec. This is by no means an extensive list, but rather a starting point for your research. Looking for a title or author not listed on this page - try using the search box below. If you cannot find a specific title, you can either request for UFV Library borrow it from another library or that the UFV Library purchases the item (see the corresponding links below).
Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature by 
The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition by 
Surrealism and Quebec Literature by 
The Quebec Connection by Here is a small selection of Quebec authors (who either were born, lived a significant amount of time, or died in Quebec) in the UFV Library collections:
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Nicole Brossard by 
Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen by 
On F.R. Scott : Essays on His Contributions to Law, Literature, and Politics by 
Robert Lepage on the Toronto Stage : Language, Identity, Nation by 
"In Dominoes at the Crossroads Kaie Kellough maps an alternate nation--one populated by Caribbean Canadians who hopscotch across the country. The characters navigate race, class, and coming-of-age. Seeking opportunity, some fade into the world around them, even as their minds hitchhike, dream, and soar. Some appear in different times and hemispheres, whether as student radicals, secret agents, historians, fugitive slaves, or jazz musicians." - Summary
"Fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor, chasing fear and desire and the mysterious Angela Parkins, and breaking free from her mother and her mother's lover in their roadside Mauve Motel. And then we are with Maude Laures as she reads Mauve Desert, this story of Mélanie, and becomes obsessed with it. She embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning, which leads us into the third part, Mauve, the Horizon, Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert-like all good translations, it is both the same and enticingly different from the original. Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive, exhilarating and erotic; Margaret Atwood says it's full of 'brilliant sparks and white hot fragments.' Originally published in 1990, Mauve Desert is a defining work of Canadian fiction and a perennial favourite." - Summary
"In this classic road novel, Jacques Poulin tells the story of a man in search of his brother. The geographical journey — through Detroit, into Chicago, on to St. Louis, along the Oregon Trail and into California — becomes a metaphor for the exploration of the history of the French in North America." - Amazon.ca
This book is "cast in the first person as the diary of François Galarneau, a working-class rebel who owns and operates a hot-dog stand in the Montréal suburb of Île-Perrot. Interweaving the story of his "failed" personal life, narrated piecemeal and randomly, and his "naïve" observations about his society, conveyed by the author with satiric insight and poetic power, Galarneau's diary is begun as a pastime suggested by his mistress but soon acquires the resilient humour of an existential act." - Canadian Encyclopedia
"Following the life of newborn infant, Emmanuel, this great contemporary novel of Quebec exposes a painful history central to the new consciousness that emerged in the 1960s known as “the quiet revolution.” The story of Emmanuel and his 15 brothers and sisters spotlights the grinding poverty under the mental regime of the Catholic Church at its least enlightened and most inescapable. This insightful narrative documents the hardships and cruelties of their social condition with dark humor and passionate imagination as they endeavor to survive harsh schools, dreary convents, and hunger." - Amazon.ca
"St. Urbain’s Horseman is a complex, moving, and wonderfully comic evocation of a generation consumed with guilt – guilt at not joining every battle, at not healing every wound. Thirty-seven-year-old Jake Hersh is a film director of modest success, a faithful husband, and a man in disgrace. His alter ego is his cousin Joey, a legend in their childhood neighbourhood in Montreal. Nazi-hunter, adventurer, and hero of the Spanish Civil War, Joey is the avenging horseman of Jake’s impotent dreams. When Jake becomes embroiled in a scandalous trial in London, England, he puts his own unadventurous life on trial as well, finding it desperately wanting as he steadfastly longs for the Horseman’s glorious return. Irreverent, deeply felt, as scathing in its critique of social mores as it is uproariously funny, St. Urbain’s Horseman confirms Mordecai Richler’s reputation as a pre-eminent observer of the hypocrisies and absurdities of modern life." - Penguin Random House Canada
"A classic of Canadian literature by the great Quebecoise writer, Kamouraska is based on a real nineteenth-century love-triangle in rural Quebec. It paints a poetic and terrifying tableau of the life of Elisabeth d'Aulnieres: her marriage to Antoine Tassy, squire of Kamouraska; his violent murder; and her passion for George Nelson, an American doctor." - Amazon.ca
This work "is a surrealist fable set in rural Québec during the Second World War. Carrier uses the conscription crisis to allegorize the tragedy of fear and hatred governing French-English relations. The novel is dominated by the wake and funeral of the war hero Corriveau. Corriveau's friend Bérubé beats his bride Molly, a Newfoundland whore, while his officers, the "English" soldiers who delivered the corpse, are attacked by the villagers." - Canadian Encyclopedia
"A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists. When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard, influential author of Policing Black Lives , and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, award-winning author of several books, including the recent novel Noopiming , began writing each other letters--a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity, and by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Their letters soon grew into a powerful exchange on the subject of where we go from here." - Summary
"Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better. In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth." - thischangeseverything.org/book
"Robert, the younger brother, was drawn into a drama which shook up Montreal's polite society. After he seduced the beautiful and ambitious Margaret Galbraith, a student at the McGill Normal School, he arranged an abortion for her with an up-and-coming young doctor who soon after committed suicide. The subsequent trial of Robert Notman became cause-célèbre in the newly minted Dominion of Canada in 1868. Portrait of a Scandal depicts a society that distanced itself from sexual misconduct, while it lapped up its every detail." - www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550653571
"In The Power of Story, Johnson explains the role of storytelling in every aspect of human life, from personal identity to history and the social contracts that structure our societies, and illustrates how we can direct its potential to re-create and reform not only our own lives, but the life we share. Companionable, clear-eyed, and, above all, optimistic, Johnson's message is both a dire warning and a direct invitation to each of us to imagine and create, together, the world we want to live in." - Description
"A valuable resource for understanding Canadian literary modernism, diasporic Judaism, and the culture of Montreal, A.M. Klein: The Letters is a remarkable portrait of an important Canadian literary figure of the twentieth century." - Description
"The Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen's last poems, selected and ordered by the author in the final months of his life. Featuring lyrics, prose pieces, and illustrations, the book also contains an extensive selection from Cohen's notebooks, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker." - Summary
"This bilingual work (English and Innu-aimun) is an invitation to dialogue. Message sticks are the signs that allow the nomadic Innu to orient themselves inland and find their way. The poetry brings the language of the nutshimit (the back country) to life again, recalling the sound of the drum. Simple and beautiful, Joséphine Bacon’s poetry is an homage to the land, the ancestors, and the Innu-aimun language. Charting unwritten history, it provides a vision into the intensity of the elders’ words." - www.mawenzihouse.com/product/message-sticks-tshissinuatshitakana/
"Spawn is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Marie-Andrée Gill's poems ask: How can one reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers? The poet's young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers' names into every surface imaginable." - Summary
"This edition of Nelligan's poems, with a critical introduction by the editor and translator, is the first complete English translation of Nelligan's poetry authorized by the Emile Nelligan Foundation. With this book the editor hopes to persuade the reader that Emile Nelligan, "the most brilliant and original of the poets of the Ecole Littéraire of Montreal," was also the finest Canadian poet of the nineteenth century. In this view he is seconded by the American critic Edmund Wilson, who wrote: "The accepted idea [in Canada]. . . is that the poetry of English Canada is excellent and better than their fiction, and it irritates them to be told that the best Canadian poet was French." - Summary
"... Even as vowels tremble in danger and worldly destruction repeats itself on the horizon, Ardour reminds us that the silence pulsing within us is also a language of connection. In these poems, intimacy with the other is another astonishment—a pleasant gasp, a "pause that transforms light and breath into language and threshold of fire." Since her first book appeared fifty years ago, Nicole Brossard has left us breathless, expanding our notion of poetry and its possibilities." - Description
"The development of French poetry in Canada during the past four decades is represented by the works of twenty writers who reflect the changing social and political climate of Quebec. Major innovators, and highly individualistic writers are also included to give a comprehensive view of the scope and depth of French poetry in this country." - from the rear cover.
"Found in Translation is a unique and exciting look at the process of translation, where poems from seventeen poets from Quebec are each translated by five different translators. Poets: Michel Beaulieu, Claude Beausoleil, Paul Bélanger, François Charron, Carole David, Jean, Marc Desgent, Kim Doré, Patrick Lafontaine, Tania Langlais, René Lapierre, Corinne Larochelle, Bernard Pozier, Dominique Robert, Danielle Roger, André Roy, Élise Turcotte and Denis Vanier. Translators: Antonio D Alfonso, Kate Cunningham, Oisín Curran, Anne McDonald and Carmen Ruschiensky." - Amazon.ca
"Germaine Lauzon has won a million trading stamps from a department store. Her head swimming with dreams of refurbishing and redecorating her working-class home from top to bottom with catalogue selections ranging from new kitchen appliances to “real Chinese paintings on velvet,” she invites fourteen of her friends and relatives in the neighbourhood over to help her paste the stamps into booklets." - Amazon.ca
"In this contemporary retelling of Antigone, denial of what rages outside of a city's perimeter comes to a head when a young princess named Alison tries to expose the truth of her beloved cousin Henry's death. By night, Henry went as Andy, as together he and Alison scaled the walls of their kingdom to help the migrants who are kept out of sight. Burdened by the weight of the inequality that his future reign represented, he killed himself. But his mother, Queen Regina, hails his death as a valiant knight and will do anything she can to keep Alison silent. The two women become locked in a poetic battle of power and prejudice, until a push turning into a shove might mean it's too late to find peace." - Summary
"If only life could be like the movies! This fizzy concoction takes the classic ingredients of romantic comedy, love, humour, coincidence and fantasy and serves them up with a surprisingly touching twist in this tender and witty comedy by an extraordinary new voice from Quebec." - Summary
"Covering a diverse range of subject matter, many of these plays are published in English for the first time." - Playwrights Canada Press
"The seventeenth century and present day are seamlessly intertwined as Satan vents to an audience about her frustration at being cast out of Heaven and her thoughts on oppression. When she finds out that God has created delicate new creatures called "humans," she crafts a plan for revenge and betrayal on the Almighty. Erin Shields turns Heaven and Hell upside down in this witty, modern, feminist retelling of John Milton's epic poem about the first battle between good and evil. Shields's wickedly smart and funny script questions the reasons of the universe, the slow process of evolution and the freedom of knowledge. The debate over right and wrong has never been so satisfying." - Description
"A terrorist attack in Jerusalem puts Eitan, a young Israeli-German genetic researcher, in a coma, while his girlfriend Wahida, a Moroccan graduate student, is left to uncover his family secret that brought them to Israel in the first place. Since Eitan's parents erupted at a Passover meal when they realized Wahida was not Jewish, he has harboured a suspicion about his heritage that, if true, could change everything." - Description
You can use the following resources to find information on titles and authors from BC. Associations will likely also have news and updates that may feature interviews or prize winners.
