Winner of the 2016 Prix des Libraires

Winner of the 2016 Quebecor Prize for the Trois-Rivières Poetry Festival

Carole David's The Year of My Disappearance is a searing, surreal, darkly comic descent into a woman's psyche. From Governor General's Award winning translator, Donald Winkler, into English, comes this pitiless assault on the author's own torments and pretenses. Present here are figures lodged in her memory: lovers, strangers, her mother, and Bosch-like apparitions out of her dreams and imaginings. Through it all, a fierce combat is being waged between immolation and survival. As David has written, "I gave free range to the lives that dwelt within me." It's down this road the blind spot sings.

Carole David was born in Montreal and earned a PhD in literary studies from the University of Sherbrooke. She has taught at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal and was head of the Public Lending Rights Program at the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2006, she was elected president of the Maison de la poésie de Montréal. David received the Prix Émile-Nelligan for Terroristes and in 1996 she was awarded the Terrasses Saint-Sulpice poetry prize by the magazine Estuaire for her poetry collection Abandons. Her novel Impala was a finalist for the Journal de Montréal prize and for the City of Montreal prize. La Maison d'Ophélie was on the shortlist for the Governor General's Award for French-language poetry in 1999. She received the Prix Alain-Grandbois in 2011 for her collection Manuel de poétique à l'intention des jeunes filles; the same collection was also included on the shortlist for the Governor General's poetry award. In 2020 se was named the recipient of Quebec's Prix Athanase-David for lifetime achievement in literature.

Carole David's profile page

Donald Winkler was born in Winnipeg, graduated from the University of Manitoba, and did graduate study at the Yale School of Drama. From 1967 to 1995 he was a film director and writer at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, and since the 1980s, a translator of Quebec literature. In 1994, 2011, and 2013 he won the Governor General Award for French to English translation, and has been a finalist for the prize on three other occasions. His translation of Samuel Archibald's short story collection, "Arvida," was a finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize. He lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Donald Winkler's profile page

Praise for The Year of My Disappearance:

"This sharp-witted poetry, knife blades at the ready, speaks of the landscape a woman may come to inhabit who is undone, overwhelmed by the violence to which any life is subject when weighed down by remembrances." —Hugues Corriveau, Le Devoir