• About Us
• Authors
• Books
• Contact
• Upcoming Events
• Meta-Talon
• News
• Ordering
• Sales & Distribution
• Submission Guidelines
• View Shopping Cart
•  
• Browse Books by Category
• Drama
• Fiction
• Non-Fiction
• Poetry

Michel Tremblay

Born in a working-class family in Quebec, novelist and playwright Michel Tremblay was raised in Montreal’s Le Plateau neighbourhood. An ardent reader since a young age, Tremblay began to write, in hiding, as a teenager. One of the most produced and the most prominent playwrights in the history of Canadian theatre, Tremblay has received countless prestigious honours and accolades. Because of their charismatic originality, their vibrant character portrayals and the profound vision they embody, Tremblay’s dramatic, literary and autobiographical works have long enjoyed remarkable international popularity; his plays have been adapted and translated into dozens of languages and have achieved huge success in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. Of his own work, Tremblay has said,I know what I want in the theatre. I want a real political theatre, but I know that political theatre is dull. I write fables.”

Tremblay’s novel The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant was long-listed for the CBC Canada Reads program in both 2002 and 2003. In 2004, he appeared as a guest of honour at the Calgary WordFest. In January and February of 2005, the Manitoba Theatre Centre presented TremblayFest: a two-week extravaganza in which fifteen of Tremblay’s stage plays were performed by sixteen different theatre companies. In April 2006—as Montreal concluded its term as World Book Capital—Tremblay was the recipient of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix, awarded annually in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement to a writer of international stature and accomplishment.


Awards and Recognition*
Prix du Grand (2009) La Traversée de la ville (Leméac Editeur Inc.)
Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix (2006)
Globe and Mail Top 100 Books (2003) Birth of a Bookworm
Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play (2000) For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again
Chalmers Awards (1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1978, 1986, 1989, 2000)
Governor General’s Performing Arts Award (1999)
Molson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts (1994)
Louis-Hémon Prize (1994)
Montreal Book Fair Grand Public Prize (1994)
Banff Centre National Award (1992)
Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France (1991)
Chevalier of the Order of Quebec (1990)
San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Festival Long-Standing Public Service Award (1989)
CBC Anik Prize (1988)
Athanase-David Lifetime Achievement Prize (1988)
Quebec-Paris Prize (1985)
Chevalier of Arts and Letters of France (1984).

BOOK AWARDS

Winner of the 2000 Dora Mavor Moore Award General Theatre: Outstanding New Play

BOOK AWARDS

Finalist for the 2002 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation

BOOK AWARDS

Finalist for the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation

BOOK AWARDS

Winner of the 1990 The Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award

QUOTES OF NOTE

“The story of a life, told by Tremblay with immense compassion.”

— Toronto Sun

“A remarkable play …. The conception is brilliant.”

— New Statesman

“Michel Tremblay’s Albertine—a fascinating, conflicted woman who refuses to
take life’s knocks lying down—is one of Quebec theatre’s most celebrated characters.”

— _Jackie Maxwell, Shaw Festival

QUOTES OF NOTE

"Tremblay’s charters don’t merely exist, they live out complex, sprawling lives" — Globe and Mail

QUOTES OF NOTE

Tremblay’s characters don’t merely exist, they live out complex, sprawling lives.
— Globe & Mail

QUOTES OF NOTE

“It’s vintage Tremblay (out-Prousting Proust), filled with primal
privations and inspirations of awe, a family’s love and terrors, the stuff
that makes a writer a writer: Family. Church. Lust. Poverty. The whole
enthralling works.”

— Globe and Mail

QUOTES OF NOTE

“Michel Tremblay succeeds in building a rich and tangible universe. The Black Notebook possesses a rare intelligence in painting lively portraits of those in struggle, who do not play by established rules and who cannot be defined by absolutes.”
— Le Devoir “The themes dear to Michel Tremblay can be found in this novel: humiliation, marginality, parent-child relationships, the difficulty of being different … ”
— Nuit blanche

“Tremblay’s work has always been marked by his compassion for the underdog—women more often than not—and The Black Notebook continues that tradition … The Black Notebook emerges as a powerful character study, a social history—as always with Tremblay, the political content is there, but always as an organic element of the story—as well as a love letter to the world of the theatre.”

— Montreal Review of Books

“Few will fail to empathize with the demi-heroine featuring in _The Black Notebook_’s pages … Despite the sometimes inescapable seriousness of his material, Tremblay will induce chortles, chuckles and belly laughs in hapless readers, not to mention expanding upon the delight readers will no doubt take in his mastery of caricature. With a stroke here, a telling detail there, he creates characters who linger in the mind to participate in a marvellously mysterious mental dance.

The internationally revered playwright continues to prove his prowess, economically telegraphing the anguish of savaged youth evaporating into an anonymous and opaque past, which can only be rescued by brave new words and lovingly shaping a fictional world that magnifies, clarifies and illuminates our own obdurate existence.”

— Globe and Mail

QUOTES OF NOTE

“The best of Tremblay can be found in these Assorted Candies: the unparalleled dialogist, the prodigious portraitist, the attentive memorialist, and above all, the writer who manages to retain the childhood sense of wonder.”
— Voir “Michel Tremblay wrote this book with evident pleasure, a contagious one.”
— La Presse “The idealized memories of childhood told via colourful dialogues mark the charm of … Bonbons Assortis.”
— Canadian Literature

“Linda Gaboriau elegantly transports the English reader into the bustling world of Michel Tremblay’s childhood. She maintains the narrative simplicity and natural dialogue of his stories, as seen and heard from a child’s point of view.”

— 2006 Governor General’s Literary Awards Jury

“As indelibly as Mordecai Richler staked a claim to the Jewish Montreal of Mile End, Tremblay’s novels, plays, and autobiographical writings have made working-class French Montreal an archetypal literary setting … Tremblay’s knack for recalling and accessing his boyhood self is uncanny. Assorted Candies is short but sweet.”

— Montreal Review of Books

“It’s vintage Tremblay (out-Prousting Proust), filled with primal privations and inspirations of awe, a family’s love and terrors, the stuff that makes a writer a writer: Family. Church. Lust. Poverty. The whole enthralling works.”

— Globe and Mail

QUOTES OF NOTE

The text is as severe, intense and implacable as the reality of each character.
— CBC Radio Canada

QUOTES OF NOTE

The really scary, or beautiful, part is how much Albertine there is in every one of us.
— Globe & Mail