Renowned Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant has died, the Globe and Mail and CBC are reporting.
Gallant was 91 and lived in Paris. Her funeral will be held on Saturday, the Globe and Mail reported.
Born in Canada, Gallant was frequently published in the New Yorker since the 1950s. Gallant began her career as a journalist in Montreal but moved to Paris to pursue fiction writing.
" I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool," she told the Paris Review in an interview.
Gallant was a relative unknown in Canada, until McClelland and Stewart published her stories in the late 1970s. She would go on to win a number of awards in Canada including the Governor-General's Award and the Order of Canada.
Her stories drew on the experiences of her turbulent childhood, her father died when she was 10 and Gallant found herself frequently on the move with her mother and stepfather, and her experiences as an expatriate.
Author Margaret Atwood tweeted her condolences.
Her journals will be published by Knopf later this year. An excerpt of it can be read in the New Yorker.
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