Anne Hébert

Anne Hébert (1916-2000) was a Canadian novelist, poet and screenwriter who wrote in French from Quebec. Her work spans poetry, short fiction, novels and film, and she became one of the most important voices in twentieth-century Quebec literature.

She was born in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, near Quebec City, into a literary household: her father, Maurice Hébert, was a poet and critic. She began writing poems and stories while still young. Her cousin and childhood friend, the modernist poet Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, was a close presence during those years. Her first collection of poems, Les Songes en Équilibre, appeared in 1942 and won the Prix David.

The deaths of Garneau in 1943 and of her only sister, Marie, in 1952 left a deep mark on her poetry, which filled with images of death and drowning. Her short stories, Le Torrent, were turned down by Quebec publishers and came out in 1950 only because Roger Lemelin paid for the edition. During the 1950s she worked for Radio Canada and for Canada's national film bureau. In 1954 she moved to Paris, where she lived for much of her life.

Her career as a novelist began with The Silent Rooms (1958). Her interest lay less in realist narration than in alienation and rebellion, themes that also drive Kamouraska (1970), a suspenseful story set in nineteenth-century Quebec. In the Shadow of the Wind (1982) followed and won the Prix Femina. Her books have been translated into several languages, including English and Spanish.

Hébert won the Governor General's Award three times, twice for fiction and once for poetry. In 1978 she declined an offer from Premier René Lévesque to become lieutenant governor of Quebec. She returned to Montreal in the late 1990s and died there in 2000. Her legacy lives on in translations of her work and in critical interest in a Quebec fiction marked by introspection and symbolic intensity.