Anne Hébert
| Anne Hébert | |
|---|---|
| Born | August, 1916 St. Catherine de Fossambault, Quebec |
| Died |
January 22, 2000 (aged 83) Montreal |
| Language | French |
| Citizenship | Canadian |
| Notable works | Les Songes en Équilibre, Poèmes, Kamouraska |
| Notable awards | Prix David, Prix Femina, FRSC, Governor General's Award, Order of Canada, Prix Duvernay, Molson Prize |
Anne Hébert, CC OQ (pronounced [an eˈbɛʁ] in French) (August 1, 1916 – January 22, 2000), was a French Canadian author and poet. She won Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, three times, twice for fiction and once for poetry.
Anne Hébert was born in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault (name later changed to Sainte-Catherine-de-Portneuf, and in 1984 to Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier), Quebec. Her father, Maurice Hébert, was a poet and literary critic. She was a cousin and childhood friend of modernist poet Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau.
She began writing poems and stories at a young age, and "found her work being published in a variety of periodicals by the time she was in her early twenties."Les Songes en Équilibre, (1942) was Hébert's first collection of poems published. It got good reviews and won her the .
In 1943 her cousin, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, "died of a heart attack at the age of 31. In 1952, her only sister Marie died suddenly of an illness. These two events would help shape her poetic vision, full of images of death and drowning."
No Quebec publisher would publish her 1945 collection of stories, Le Torrent. It was finally published in 1950 at the expense of Roger Lemelin.
Hébert was affiliated with Canada's first film bureau. She worked for Radio Canada, Film Board of Canada and National Film Board of Canada during the 1950s.
Again, she could not find a publisher for her second book of poetry, Le Tombeau des rois (The Tomb of Kings), and had to publish it at her own expense. In 1954 Hébert used a grant from the Royal Society of Canada to move to Paris, thinking that the city would be more receptive to her writing.
Hébert returned to Canada in the 1990s. Her last novel Un Habit de lumière was published in 1998.
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