Author: Gabrielle Roy

Roy grew up in the French-speaking part of Saint Boniface in Manitoba and taught in prairie schools before going to Europe and then to Montreal, where she reported on the working-class district of Saint-Henri. Bonheur d'occasion came out of that reporting, published in 1945 and translated as The Tin Flute: a family in a Montreal slum during the war, where enlistment is among the few reliable routes to a wage. It took the Prix Femina, the first time a Canadian had won it, and is generally treated as the book that turned Quebec fiction from the rural toward the urban. Hannah Josephson made the first English translation, later replaced by Alan Brown's.