Nicole Brossard

Poet, novelist and essayist Nicole Brossard was born in Montreal. Since 1965, she has published some 30 books, including Le Centre blanc, The Aerial Letter, Mauve Desert, Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon and Cahier de roses et de civilisation.

Ms. Brossard is considered to be one of the foremost figures in the generation that revitalized Quebec poetry in the 1970s. She co-founded the influential literary magazine La Barre du Jour in 1965 and the feminist magazine Les Têtes de Pioche in 1976. She also co-directed a film, SOME AMERICAN FEMINISTS, in 1976. In 1991, along with Lisette Girouard, she published the Anthologie de la poésie des femmes au Québec (Des origines à nos jours).

Ms. Brossard has won the Governor General’s award twice for her poetry (1974 and 1984) and took home Le Grand Prix de Poésie de la Fondation les Forges at the Festival International de la Poésie de Trois-Rivières in 1989 and 1999. The Athanase-David Prize, Quebec’s highest literary honor, was awarded to her in 1991. That same year, she received the Harbourfront Festival Prize. In 1994, she was made a member of L’Académie des Lettres du Québec. In 2003, she received a career grant from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and the W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize.

Her work has been widely translated and internationally acclaimed. The most recent titles available in English are Museum of Bone and Water, and Mauve Desert. Mauve Desert and Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon are two of six of her books that have been translated into Spanish. Her latest collection of poems is Je m’en vais à Trieste (2003), and she has just put out Baiser vertige, Quebec’s first anthology of gay and lesbian prose and poetry. In 2005, Louise H. Forsyth, professor and literary critic, published Nicole Brossard: Essays on Her Works. (07/12)

Some American Feminists
A film by Luce Guilbeault, Nicole Brossard and Margaret Wescott, 1980, 56 min., Color
SOME AMERICAN FEMINISTS explores one of the most significant social histories of this century-the second wave of the women's movement-and is a fascina...