Nancy Huston

Nancy Huston
is a Canadian-born novelist and essayist who writes primarily in French and translates her own works into English.

Huston was born on September 16, 1953 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where she lived until age fifteen, at which time her family moved to Wilton, New Hampshire, USA. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she was given the opportunity to spend a year of her studies in Paris. Arriving in Paris in 1973, Huston obtained a Master's Degree from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, writing a thesis on swear words under the supervision of Roland Barthes.

Ms. Huston lives in Paris with her husband Tzvetan Todorov and their two children.

Career
Though she had not learned French before arriving in Paris, Huston found that the combination of her eventual command of the language and her distance from it as a non-native speaker helped her to find her literary voice. Since 1980, Huston has published over nineteen books of fiction and non-fiction, including the three English versions of previously published French works. Of her novels, only Histoire d'Omaya (1985) and Trois fois septembre (1989) have not been published in English.

In 1998, she was nominated for a Governor General's Award for her novel L'Empreinte de l'ange. The next year she was nominated for a Governor General's Award for translating the work into English as The Mark of the Angel.

In 1999, she appeared in the film Emporte-moi, on which she collaborated on the screenplay.

In 2005, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and she received the Prix Femina in 2006 for the novel Lignes de faille and which, as Fault Lines, has been published by McArthur & Company and was shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize and the Prix Goncourt.

In 2010, McArthur & Company will publish her play Queen Jocasta in the fall.

Her works have been translated into many languages from Chinese to Russian.

Works by Nancy Huston, available from McArthur & Co