Gabrielle Roy

Gabrielle Roy is best known as an award-winning French author. However, she has also worked as a teacher, actress, columnist, journalist, short-story writer and reporter. Although born in Manitoba, she spent most of her life in Quebec.

Many schools and libraries are named in her honor. As is an island in the Waterhen River where Gabrielle Roy lived. A quotation from her novel The Hidden Mountain  appears on Canadian $20 bills printed between 2004 and 2012.

"Would we know ourselves even a little, without the arts?"

• 1909: Gabrielle Roy is born on March 22 in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba.

• 1937: She leaves to study drama in London, then Paris.

• 1939: She settles in Montreal, far from her family, and earns a living as a freelance journalist while writing her first novel.

• 1945: Her first novel, The Tin Flute, is published, a landmark work in the literary world, receiving prestigious awards including the Governor General's Award and the Prix Fémina (she is the first Canadian to win this prize). In no time at all, this novel becomes one of the greatest successes of Quebec literature.

• 1947: She marries physician Marcel Carbotte; the couple settle in France.

• 1950: The couple move to Canada and, two years later, to Quebec, where Gabrielle Roy will spend the rest of her life.

• 1950 to 1977: She publishes several works. These include the novels The Little Water Hen (1950), Alexandre Chenevert (1954), Rue Deschambault (1955), whose translation Street of Riches won the Governor General's Award (1957), The Hidden Mountain (1961) and the short story collections Garden in the Wind (1975) and Children of My Heart (1977), which also won the Governor General's Award.

• 1983: Gabrielle Roy dies on July 13, in Quebec City. 

• 1984: Her publisher posthumously publishes the novelized autobiography Enchantment and Sorrow and, later, the second part of this work, Le Temps qui m'a manqué (1997).