It is with sadness that we announce the death of Marie-Claire Blais (CRF 1996).
“Marie-Claire Blais, a novelist whose long, elliptical sentences and incisive explorations of human consciousness won her comparisons with Virginia Woolf and a place alongside Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood as one of Canada’s greatest contemporary writers, died on Nov. 30 at her home in Key West, Fla. She was 82…Like William Faulkner, another writer with whom she was often compared, Ms. Blais believed that collective human experiences, including evils like white supremacy and world war, were results of inner personal conflicts, and that it was the duty of the writer to explore them…[Blais wrote more than 50 fifty books over] six decades, including 29 novels, nine plays and three volumes of poetry. She won practically every prize available to Canadian writers, including four Governor General’s Academic Medals, one of the country’s highest literary honors.” Read the full obituary in the New York Times here.