French-Canadian writer Marie-Claire Blais was BOTD in 1939. Born in Québec City to working-class parents, she left school at 15 to support her family. She later enrolled at Université Laval, where her professors encouraged her to write fiction. Her 1959 debut novel La Belle Bête (The Beautiful Beast), a Gothic tale of family violence, incest and murder, published when she was 20, made her a literary star. She moved to Paris and later to Cape Cod, where she met her life partner, the painter and writer Mary Meigs. A prolific writer of novels, plays, poetry, radio and television drama and journalism, she was a four-time recipient of the Governor-General’s Awards for French-Canadian literature and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Her most famous novel, 1965’s Une Saison Dans la Vie d’Emmanuel (A Season in the Life of Emmanuel), focused on a rural French-Canadian family with 16 children who suffer poverty, child abuse, reform school and untimely deaths. In the 1990s, she began a 10-volume novel cycle Soifs” (Thirstings), describing her life in the gay underworld of Florida, written in a stream-of-consciousness style that earned her comparisons with Virginia Woolf. She and Meigs lived together in Key West until Meigs’ death in 2002. Blais died in 2021, aged 82.