Anne Hébert (1916–2000)

Anne Hébert was born in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault (present-day Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier), Quebec, and grew up, studied and lived in Québec City. Her father Maurice Hébert, a civil servant, was also a poet and literary critic. She began writing poems and stories at a young age.

By the time she was in her early twenties, her work had been published in a number of periodicals. Her first collection of poems, Les Songes en équilibre, was published in 1942 and won the Prix Athanase David.

Grieving over the deaths of her only sister Marie and that of her cousin, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, her poetry became filled with images of death and drowning. She could not find a publisher for her short story collection Le Torrent until 1950. The book shocked the public at the time, but the stories later grew in popularity. Her second book of anguish-filled poetry, Le Tombeau des rois also was not accepted, and she had to publish it at her own expense in 1953. She also wrote scripts for Radio Canada and the National Film Board of Canada. In 1954, she received a grant from the Royal Society of Canada and used the funds to move to Paris, hoping for great acceptance there. Her debut novel,
Les Chambres de bois (1958), was a passionate story that used evocative imagery to depict violence and brutality.

In 1960, she published Mystère de la parole, a new collection of poems on more down-to-earth subjects than her previous work. Her bestselling 1970 novel Kamouraska, set in 19th-century Québec, combined two suspenseful, romantic plotlines. The novel earned France’s Prix des Libraires and the Royal Belgian Academy’s Prix littéraire hors de France, and was adapted into a film. Hébert wrote several plays published as Le Temps sauvage. She returned to live in Canada in the 1990s. Her last novel, Un Habit de lumière, was published in 1999 and won the Prix Jean-Hamelin.