Mavis Gallant: Montreal Stories

MAVIS GALLANT was born in Montreal in 1922, and left a career as a leading journalist in that city to move to Paris in 1950 to write. Since that time she has been publishing stories on a regular basis in The New Yorker , many of which have been anthologized. Her world-wide reputation has been established by books such as From the Fifteenth District and Home Truths , which won the Governor General’s Award in 1982. In that same year she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, becoming a Companion of the Order in 1993, the year that she published Across the Bridge and was the recipient of a special tribute at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in Toronto. In 1996, The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant was published to universal acclaim. Paris Stories , a selection edited by Michael Ondaatje, appeared in 2002.

Gallant is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has received several honorary degrees from Canadian universities and has won numerous awards, including the Canada Council Molson Prize for the Arts, the inaugural Matt Cohen Award, the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

She continues to live in Paris.

RUSSELL BANKS is a novelist and short story writer. His most recent works are Cloudsplitter , a novel, and The Angel on the Roof: New and Selected Stories . He is president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in upstate New York.