“An immense loss for the Francophonie. The Canadian novelist and playwright Antonine Maillet, a great voice of Acadia and non-European first to receive the Goncourt Prize, died at the age of 95, her publisher said on Monday.
A author of around forty works, she was the first Francophone out of Europe to be a winner in 1979 of the Goncourt Prize for her novel “Pélagie-la-Charrette”. To date, it remains the only Canadian to have obtained this prestigious French literary prize.
His death is “an immense loss for the Francophonie”, tweeted the Consul General of France in Quebec. In 2021, President Emmanuel Macron had given him the medal of Commander of the Order of the Legion of Honor.
Born in 1929, in the province of New Brunswick (EST), Antonine Maillet popularized the history and culture of Acadians outside of Canada, these French speakers who live in the Atlantic coast.
“We are eternal deportees”
“Pélagie-la-Charrette” tells the story of a woman during the great disturbance, the deportation by British troops of thousands of Acadians to the south of the United States, 270 years ago. “We are eternal deportees. As a people we have experienced great trauma. The great disturbance was one of the first ethnic cleaning in the history of the West, “said the author at the Quebec daily La Presse.
In Canada, however, it is his character of “La Sagouine” who remains the best known thanks in particular to the gauge of this floor washer which honors “Chiac”, this speech of Southeast New Brunswick, mixture of old French and English.
This old woman, daughter and wife of a fisherman, tells her memories and her philosophy of life. Around the character a very tourist thematic park was created in New Brunswick: the “country of the sagouine”. “His literary heritage will continue,” the Canadian Minister of Culture said Pascale St-Onge.
The one who was commander of the Legion of Honor died on Monday in Montreal, a city of which she became a civic of honor, where she lived on the street that bears her name.