Nancy Huston

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Nancy Huston (2008)

Nancy Louise Huston (born September 16, 1953 in Calgary , Alberta ) is a Canadian - French writer who writes her works in French and English and often translates them into the other language herself. She lives in Paris .

biography

Huston was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1953. When she was six years old, the mother left the family. She then lived for several months with her future stepmother in Germany, where she learned the national language. These traumatic events - also from a linguistic point of view - have permanently shaped her attitude to mother tongue. The theme of the woman and mother who leaves their family and goes their own way, she later thematized in the novel counter- dance ( La virevolte ).

The family then moved back to Calgary, Canada. At fifteen, Nancy Huston moved to Wilton, New Hampshire , USA with her father and stepmother . In high school, she learned French. She attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville , New York . As part of this training, she was given the opportunity to study for a year in the college's branch in Paris. From this year abroad she did not return to the USA. Huston studied at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales , including linguistics and semiotics with Roland Barthes ; she completed her studies with a master's degree. She wrote her master's thesis, supervised by Roland Barthes, on the subject of swear words , published in 1980 under the title Dire et interdire, éléments de jurologie .

Nancy Huston lived in Paris with her husband Tzvetan Todorov until his death in 2017 . You have two children.

Career as a writer

The fact that she was able to speak French but not her mother tongue helped her develop her own literary voice. Since 1980, Huston has published more than twenty books, novels, essays and books for children and young people, the latter partly together with her daughter Léa. Of her novels only Histoire d'Omaya (1985) and Trois fois septembre (1989) have not also appeared in English.

For her first novel Les variations Goldberg (1981) she received the Prix ​​Contrepoint , the novel was also shortlisted for the Prix ​​Femina . Your translation of the novel into English appeared under the title The Goldberg Variations (1996).

The next major award was the Canadian Governor General's Award for Fiction for French Literature, which she received for Cantiques des Plaines . The award of this prize to Huston sparked controversy in the Québec literary scene . Some critics said the author was not a French-Canadian . In addition, the novel was apparently first written in English, and the English version was not shortlisted for the same award that exists for English-language fiction. This criticism misses the essence of Huston's bilingualism; both languages ​​are "mother tongues" for her, regardless of which version she publishes first.

The next novel La virevolte (1994) was awarded the Prix "L" and the Prix Louis-Hémon. It was published in English in 1996 under the title Slow Emergencies .

Huston's novel Instruments des ténèbres , published in France in 1996 ( Instruments of Darkness 1998), was her most successful to date. He was shortlisted for the Prix Femina and for the Governor General's Award and was awarded the Prix ​​Goncourt des lycéens . As in other of her novels, the tension between "working woman and mother" plays an important role. The German criticism called the novel a "portrait of a writer of the 1968 generation".

In 1988 she was nominated for the Governor General's Award for the novel L'Empreinte de l'ange . The next year she was again nominated for this award for the translation of the novel into English under the title The Mark of the Angel .

In 1999, Huston appeared in the film Emporte-moi , which she was involved in writing.

Her works have been translated into numerous languages.

In 2005 she was honored as Officer of the Order of Canada . In 2006 she received the Prix Femina for the novel Lignes de faille . Atlantic Books published the English version under the title Fault Lines ; the English version was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2008.

In 2007 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège ; she received the same award in 2010 from the University of Ottawa .

Selected Works

Novels

Play

Essays

  • Jouer au papa et à l'amant. De l'amour des petites filles. Coll. Le Bariolé, Ramsay, Paris 1979, ISBN 2-85956-103-X
  • Dire et interdire. Éléments de jurologie. 1980
  • Mosaïque de la pornography. Marie-Thérèse et les autres. Denoël / Gonthier, Paris 1982, and Ramsay, Coll. Le Bariolé, Paris 1979, ISBN 2-85956-103-X
  • The Matrix of War. Mother and Heroes. in Susan Rubin Suleiman Ed .: The female body in western culture. Contemporary Perspectives. Harvard UP, Cambridge MA 1986, ISBN 0-674-29871-3 , pp. 119-136
  • Journal de la creation. Seuil, Paris 1990, ISBN 2-02-010933-6
  • Tombeau de Romain Gary . Actes Sud, Arles 1995 ISBN 2-7427-0313-6 ; New editions, most recently Coll. Babel 2010, ISBN 978-2-7427-3790-1 . See also web links
  • Romain Gary. A foreign body in french literature. in "Poetics Today", Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. Duke UP, No. 17, 4th winter 1996
    • Reprint in Susan Rubin Suleiman Ed .: Exile and creativity. Signposts, travelers, outsiders, backward glances. ibid. 1998 ISBN 0-8223-2215-3 , pp. 281-304
  • in German: RG A foreign body in French literature. in "Masks, Metamorphoses." Rowohlt Literaturmagazin 45, Reinbek 2000, ISBN 3-498-03908-3 ISSN  0934-6503 pp. 113 - 133

Correspondence

  • Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l'exil , with Leïla Sebbar, Éditions B. Barrault, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-290-05394-5

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Interview with The Independent, February 22, 2008 edition
  2. ↑ cf. Petra Metz and Kerstin Behre, article "Nancy Huston" in French contemporary literature. An author's dictionary , Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-45952-8 , p. 112
  3. ↑ Acknowledgment ( Memento November 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), University of Ottawa, accessed March 1, 2011
  4. ↑ an examination of their western Canadian roots without sentimentality , writes Peter Mountfort in Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada , ed. William H. New, Toronto 2002, p. 523
  5. ↑ Awarded the Prix ​​Goncourt de lycéens 1996, the Prix du Livre Inter 1997 and the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle 1999
  6. ↑ 1999 nominated for one of the Governor General's Awards , translation section
  7. ↑ A theatrical version of Gabriel Garran was performed in 2002 at the Théâtre international de langue française under the direction of Gabriel Garran. Review in Paris Voice, the magazine for English-speaking Parisians , April 2002 [1]
personal data
SURNAME Huston, Nancy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Huston, Nancy Louise (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian-French writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Calgary , Alberta , Canada