Mavis Gallant, legendary short story writer, dies at 91

Mavis Gallant, the Montreal-born writer who carved out an international reputation as a master short-story author while living in Paris for much of her life, has died at age 91, her publisher says.

The expatriate, bilingual anglophone published more than 100 short stories throughout her lauded career, many of them in the New Yorker magazine and in such collections as The Other Paris, Across the Bridge and In Transit. She also wrote two novels, Green Water, Green Sky and A Fairly Good Time, as well as the play What is to be Done?

Though she lived abroad, Gallant received several high-profile honours in her home country, including a Companion of the Order of Canada and a Governor General’s Literary Award for her collection of stories, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories.

“For more than four decades, Mavis Gallant has provided for more than one generation of writers an example of the dedicated writer who has committed her life and her writing to the pursuit of excellence,” said a jury in awarding Gallant the $50,000 Canada Council Molson Prize for the Arts in 1996.

“Without her, Canadians would not have the literary culture they now have. She has done extraordinary service to her country and its culture.”

Born Mavis Leslie Young in 1922, Gallant was an only child in a fractured, English-speaking Protestant family: her father died when she was young and her mother remarried.

Starting from age 4, she attended numerous boarding schools in Canada and the U.S., many of which were French and had no other English-speaking students besides herself.

After graduation, Gallant returned to Montreal and landed an entry-level stint at the National Film Board and then a job as a reporter for the Montreal Standard.

In 1942, Gallant married Winnipeg musician John Gallant, but they divorced five years later.

Though Montreal’s literary scene was thriving around that time —with writers including Gwethalyn Graham, Hugh MacLennan, Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen also making their mark — Gallant left Canada for Europe in 1950. She eventually settled in Paris, where she felt she could live solely as a fiction author as opposed to having to supplement her income elsewhere.

“The attitude to a writer was very important, and the attitude to a writer here is one I haven’t seen elsewhere,” she said in the 2006 Bravo television documentary Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant.

“I found for the first time in my life a society where you could say you’re a writer and not be asked for three months’ rent in advance.”

The notoriously private Gallant did visit Canada from time to time, including a 1983-84 return as writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto, where she later received a doctorate of letters.

She also included Canadian characters and settings in some of her stories, which are revered for their wit and their powerful and astute observations of conflicted human relationships.

“You’re always attached to the city you were born in, even if you think you’re not,” Gallant said in a 1965 interview with CBC-TV’s Telescope.

Her writing also earned her the Matt Cohen Prize, the Rea Award for the Short Story, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a PEN/Nabokov Award.

Her other honours include the Prix Athanase-David literary award from the government of Quebec, and a spot as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Authors who contributed to Gallant’s collections — either through introductions, afterwords or editing — include Richler, Michael Ondaatje, and Russell Banks.

Gallant also wrote, mostly by hand, in personal diaries for more than 50 years.

In a July 2012 interview with The New Yorker, Barclay — who was also a friend of Gallant’s — said she was ill in recent years and was in hospital for nine months in 2011.

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