AN INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED LITERARY ICON: Over the course of her sixty-year career, Marie-Claire Blais has established herself as one of the most accomplished writers and a literary icon in multiple languages. She has garnered numerous prestigious awards and honours, including the Gilles-Corbeil Prize, the Médicis Prize, the Molson Prize, the Writers' Trust Matt Cohen Prize, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and she is frequently talked about as a possible winner of the Nobel Prize. In 2019, she was the subject of a major profile in The New Yorker, which called her "one of the most distinctive and original living writers of fiction." A new work from Blais is always a literary event.
THE PENULTIMATE INSTALLMENT OF BLAIS'S MAGNUM OPUS: Blais's ten-novel Soifs cycle, of which Songs for Angel is the ninth installment, has been hailed as one of the most remarkable literary undertakings in literature. It's been compared to the works of Virginia Woolf in its literate, hyper-aware depiction of contemporary life. Readers who have been following the series in English since the beginning in 1997 will pick up this eagerly awaited new volume, and the cycle finds new readers every year.
A NEW AND ACCLAIMED TRANSLATOR TAKES ON THE SERIES: Katia Grubisic has already been a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation for her work on David Clerson's Frères in 2016. She's also an award-winning poet. The Soifs series has strengthened the reputation of several major translators already. Sheila Fischman and Nigel Spencer both garnered major acclaim for their work on these books. We expect that this new voice in the series will be a boon to both her career and Blais's work.
A NOVEL AT THE HEART OF CONTEMPORARY ISSUES:Previous novels in the series have dealt with vital topics like HIV/AIDS, refugees, addiction, and nuclear apocalypse. In Songs for Angel, Blais takes on the incredibly timely topics of racism and terrrorism, told through the lens of a white supremacist planning a massacre based on the Charleston church shooting in 2015. As racist violence dominates headlines and international conversations, Blais's unique depiction of these bigotries is more important than ever.
