Monique Bosco

Monique Bosco (June 8, 1927 – May 17, 2007) was an Austrian-born Canadian journalist and writer.

Background She was born in Vienna into an Austrian-Jewish family and moved to France where she lived until 1931. In 1940, Bosco spent a year In Saint-Brieuc, then took refuge in Marseilles, where she hid and ceased going to school. In 1948, she emigrated to Montreal to join her father. There, she resumed her studies. Bosco enrolled at the University of Montreal in the Faculty of Arts and received her Masters in 1951 and her PhD in 1953. In 1961, she published An Unsteady Love, her first novel, and a year later she was appointed Professor of French Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Montreal.

She worked for Radio Canada International from 1949 to 1952, as a researcher for the National Film Board of Canada from 1960 to 1962 and as a columnist for La Presse, Le Devoir and Maclean's.

Notable works Bosco's work is described as singular, intense, and full of characters who carry the weight of their lives. Several of her works transpose classic figures from Greek tragedy into a contemporary Quebec context (such as New Medea, 1974; and Portrait de Zeus peint par Minerve, 1982).

Themes of solitude and incommunication are prevalent and Monique Bosco systematically presented, in works that combined prose and poetry, the "divided beings of the world" - according to the expression of essayist Paulette Collet - suffering from painful feelings of isolation, rejection, rebellion and guilt. Eh bien! la guerre. 2005

Awards Monique Bosco was awarded the American First Novel Award in 1961 for her first novel Un amour maladroit . She received the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction in 1970 for her novel La femme de Loth.,

Bosco was awarded the Prix Athanase-David in 1996 and received the Prix Alain-Grandbois for her poetry in 1992.

She died in Montreal at the age of 79.