Nancy Huston
Encyclopedia
Nancy Louise Huston, OC
Order of Canada
The Order of Canada is a Canadian national order, admission into which is, within the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, the second highest honour for merit...

  (born September 16, 1953) is a Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

-born novelist and essayist who writes primarily in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 and translates her own works into English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

.

Biography

Huston was born in Calgary
Calgary
Calgary is a city in the Province of Alberta, Canada. It is located in the south of the province, in an area of foothills and prairie, approximately east of the front ranges of the Canadian Rockies...

, Alberta
Alberta
Alberta is a province of Canada. It had an estimated population of 3.7 million in 2010 making it the most populous of Canada's three prairie provinces...

, in Canada, the city in which she lived until age fifteen, at which time her family moved to Wilton
Wilton, New Hampshire
- Demographics :As of the census of 2000, there were 3,743 people, 1,410 households, and 1,023 families living in the town. The population density was 145.3 people per square mile . There were 1,451 housing units at an average density of 56.3 per square mile...

, New Hampshire
New Hampshire
New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...

, USA. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College is a private liberal arts college in the United States, and a leader in progressive education since its founding in 1926. Located just 30 minutes north of Midtown Manhattan in southern Westchester County, New York, in the city of Yonkers, this coeducational college offers...

 in New York, where she was given the opportunity to spend a year of her studies in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. Arriving in Paris in 1973, Huston obtained a Master's Degree from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
The École des hautes études en sciences sociales is a leading French institution for research and higher education, a Grand Établissement. Its mission is research and research training in the social sciences, including the relationship these latter maintain with the natural and life sciences...

, writing a thesis on swear words under the supervision of Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...

.

Ms. Huston lives in Paris with her husband Tzvetan Todorov
Tzvetan Todorov
Tzvetan Todorov is a Franco-Bulgarian philosopher. He has lived in France since 1963 with his wife Nancy Huston and their two children, writing books and essays about literary theory, thought history and culture theory....

 and their two children.

Career

Because French was a language acquired at school and university, Huston found that the combination of her eventual command of the language and her distance from it as a non-native speaker
Native Speaker
Native Speaker is Chang-Rae Lee’s first novel. In Native Speaker, he creates a man named Henry Park who tries to assimilate into American society and become a “native speaker.”-Plot summary:...

 helped her to find her literary voice.
Since 1980, Huston has published over 45 books of fiction and non-fiction, including theatre and children's books. Some of her publications are self-translations of previously published works. Essentially she writes in French and subsequently self-translates into English but Plainsong (1993) was written first in English and then self-translated to French as Cantique des plaines (1993) - it was, however, the French version which first found a publisher.

She has 25 fiction publications, of which 13 are original fiction and 11 are self-translation
Self-translation
Self-translation is a translation of a source text into a target text by the writer of the source text. Self-translation occurs in various writing situations...

s.

In her fiction, only Trois fois septembre (1989), Visages de l'aube (2001) and Infrarouge (2010), as well as her three children's books, have not been published in English. She has also published two plays but has not yet translated either.

She has 14 non-fiction publications, of which 12 are original publications and two are self-translation
Self-translation
Self-translation is a translation of a source text into a target text by the writer of the source text. Self-translation occurs in various writing situations...

s. The other ten non-fiction publications have not yet been self-translated.

While Huston's often controversial works of non-fiction have been well-received, her fiction has earned her the most critical acclaim. Her first novel, Les variations Goldberg (1981), was awarded the Prix Contrepoint and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina
Prix Femina
The Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse . The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury, although the authors of the winning works do not have to be women...

. She translated this novel into English as The Goldberg Variations (1996).

Her next major award came in 1993 when she was received the Canadian Governor General's Award
Governor General's Award
The Governor General's Awards are a collection of awards presented by the Governor General of Canada, marking distinction in a number of academic, artistic and social fields. The first was conceived in 1937 by Lord Tweedsmuir, a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction who created the Governor...

 for Fiction in French for Cantique des Plaines (1993). This was initially contested as it was a translation of Plainsong (1993), but Huston demonstrated that it was an adaptation and kept the prize. A subsequent novel, La virevolte (1994), won the Prix "L" and the Prix Louis-Hémon. It was published in English in 1996 as Slow Emergencies.

Huston's novel, Instruments des ténèbres, has been her most successful novel yet, being shortlisted for the Prix Femina, and the Governor General's Award. It was awarded the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens
Prix Goncourt
The Prix Goncourt is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year"...

.

In 1998, she was nominated for a Governor General's Award for her novel L'Empreinte de l'ange. The next year she was nominated for a Governor General's Award for translating the work into English as The Mark of the Angel
The Mark of the Angel
The Mark of the Angel is a 1998 novel by Canadian writer Nancy Huston. It was originally published in French, appearing under the title L'Empreinte de l'Ange. Both editions were nominated in Canada for a Governor General's Award in 1998 and 1999 respectively...

.

In 1999, she appeared in the film Emporte-moi
Emporte-moi
Emporte-Moi is a 1999 French-Canadian film by director Léa Pool and starring Karine Vanasse. It tells the story of Hanna, a girl struggling with her sexuality and the depression of both her parents as she goes through puberty in Quebec in 1963...

, also collaborating on the screenplay.

Her works have been translated into many languages from Chinese to Russian.

In 2005, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada
Order of Canada
The Order of Canada is a Canadian national order, admission into which is, within the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, the second highest honour for merit...

, and she received the Prix Femina
Prix Femina
The Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse . The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury, although the authors of the winning works do not have to be women...

 in 2006 for the novel Lignes de faille and which, as Fault Lines, has been published by Atlantic Books and is shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize.

Her latest novel is Infrarouge (2010).

In 2007, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège
University of Liège
The University of Liège , in Liège, Wallonia, Belgium, is a major public university in the French Community of Belgium. Its official language is French.-History:...

.

In 2010, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa.

Selected works

Fiction:
  • The Goldberg Variations (1996) = self-translation of Les variations Goldberg (1981)
  • The Story of Omaya (1987) = self-translation of Histoire d'Omaya (1985)
  • Trois fois septembre (1989) [no English self-translation]
  • Plainsong (1993) = Cantique des plaines (self-translation)(1993)
  • Slow Emergencies (1996) = self-translation of La Virevolte (1994)
  • Instruments of Darkness (1997) = self-translation of Instruments des ténèbres (1996)
  • The Mark of the Angel (1998) = self-translation of L'empreinte de l'ange (1988)
  • Prodigy: A Novella (2000) = self-translation of Prodige : polyphonie (1999)
  • Limbes/Limbo (2000) [bilingual edition]
  • Visages de l'aube (2001) [with Valérie Winckler - no English version]
  • Dolce Agonia (2001) = self-translation of the French version Dolce agonia (2001), cover illustration by Ralph Petty
    Ralph Petty
    Ralph Petty is an American figurative and landscape painter, musician, saxophonist, and singer living in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, France.- Biography :...

  • An Adoration(2003) = self-translation of Une adoration (2003)
  • Fault Lines (2007) = self-translation of Lignes de faille (2006)
  • Infrarouge (2010) [no English self-translation - yet]


Theatre:
  • Angela et Marina (2002) [with Valérie Grail - no English self-translation]
  • Jocaste reine (2009) [no English self-translation]


Non-fiction:
  • Jouer au papa et à l'amant (1979) [no English self-translation]
  • Dire et interdire : éléments de jurologie (1980) [no English self-translation]
  • Mosaïque de la pornographie : Marie-Thérèse et les autres (1982) [no English self-translation]
  • Journal de la création (1990)[no English self-translation]
  • Tombeau de Romain Gary (1995) [no English self-translation]
  • Pour un patriotisme de l'ambiguïté (1995) [no English self-translation]
  • Nord perdu : suivi de Douze France (1999)
  • Losing north: musings on land, tongue and self (2002) [self-translation of Nord perdu : suivi de Douze France]
  • Professeurs de désespoir (2004) [no English self-translation]
  • Passions d'Annie Leclerc (2007) [no English self-translation]
  • L'espèce fabulatrice (2008)
  • The Tale-Tellers: A Short Study of Humankind (2008) [self-translation of L'espèce fabulatrice]


Correspondence:
  • À l'amour comme à la guerre (1984) [no English version]
  • Lettres parisiennes : autopsie de l'exil [with Leila Sebbar] (1986) [no English version]


Selected texts:
  • Désirs et réalités : textes choisis 1978-1994 (1995) [no English version]
  • Âmes et corps : textes choisis 1981-2003 (2004) [no English version]


Children's fiction:
  • Véra veut la vérité (1994) [with Léa Huston & Willi Glasauer - no English version]
  • Dora demande des détails (1997) [with Léa Huston & Pascale Bougeault - no English version]
  • Les souliers d'or (1998) [no English self-translation]

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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