About the Translator

Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Sheila Fischman is a graduate of the University of Toronto. A co-founder of the periodical Ellipse: Œuvres en traduction / Writers in Translation, she has also been a columnist for the Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette, a broadcaster with cbc Radio and literary editor of the Montreal Star. She now devotes herself full time to literary translation, specializing in contemporary Quebec fiction, and has translated more than 125 Quebec novels by, among others, Michel Tremblay, Jacques Poulin, Anne Hébert, François Gravel, Marie-Claire Blais and Roch Carrier.

Sheila Fischman has received numerous honours, including the 1998 Governor General’s Award (for her translation of Michel Tremblay’sBambi and Me, Talonbooks); she has been a finalist fourteen times for this award. She has received two Canada Council Translation Prizes, two Félix-Antoine Savard Awards from Columbia University and, in 2008, she received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Ottawa and Waterloo.