Heather O'Neill won Canada Reads as a writer — now she's a panellist championing Catherine Leroux's The Future
The great Canadian book debate airs from March 4-7
Author, poet and screenwriter Heather O'Neill is championing the novel The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou on Canada Reads 2024!
O'Neill's first novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, won Canada Reads 2007 and she's looking forward to joining this year's show as a panellist.
The great Canadian book debate will take place on March 4-7. This year, we are looking for one book to carry us forward.
The debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen and on CBC Books. The debates will take place live at 10:05 a.m. ET. You can tune in live or catch a replay on the platform of your choice. Check out all the broadcast details here.
From Canada Reads winning author to panellist
O'Neill's Canada Reads journey began in 2007, when musician John K. Samson championed her novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, to victory. This year, she's on the other side of the debate and is excited to use her literary expertise to make the case for The Future.
O'Neill is a novelist, short story writer and essayist based in Montreal. She was the first back-to-back finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for The Girl Who Was Saturday Night in 2014 and her short story collection Daydreams of Angels in 2015. Lullabies for Little Criminals was also a Giller Prize finalist.
Her novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for Canada Reads 2021. When We Lost Our Heads is her most recent novel that follows two extraordinary young women — Marie Antoine and Sadie Arnett — 19th century aristocrats living in Montreal's wealthiest neighbourhood, the Golden Mile.
Being a contender on this year's Canada Reads feels almost like a full circle moment, said O'Neill in an interview with CBC Books.
"Lullabies for Little Criminals was my debut novel and after it was announced as the winner, [my daughter and I] went to the big Indigo downtown," she said. "And we sat up on the gallery and because there was a wall of my books, we watched people walk in and take the book to buy it. And every time one of them took a book off the shelf, we would jump up and down and applaud."
"So it was such a wonderful experience for me that when they called and they're like, 'Do you want to be a panellist? I'm like, 'Absolutely, bring me back to that world.'"
Showcasing Quebec writing
A voracious reader since childhood, O'Neill had some parameters to narrow down her search for her Canada Reads.
"Some of the major lists used to always have a French Canadian title on them," she said. "But I noticed that for the past couple of years they haven't been on the Giller list or the Canada Reads list. And every time that happened I was a little disappointed."
She wanted to champion a book in translation to drum up interest in francophone writers across the rest of the country. After O'Neill read The Future, she knew that it would make a great pick for Canada Reads.
"There are just so many themes," she said. "There's so much to talk about just in the writing itself, the way this book is structured and the content and the language. It seemed like there was a lot from my own knowledge bank that would allow me to talk about the book in an interesting way."
A speculative and eerie alternate history of Detroit
The Future is set in an alternate history of Detroit where the French never surrendered the city to the U.S. Its residents deal with poverty, pollution and a legacy of racism. When Gloria, a woman looking for answers about her missing granddaughters, arrives in the city, she finds a kingdom of orphaned and abandoned children who have created their own society.
The Future won the Jacques-Brossard Award for speculative fiction.
Leroux is a writer, translator and journalist from Montreal. She was shortlisted for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize for The Party Wall, which is an English translation of her French-language short story collection Le mur mitoyen. Leroux won the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for English to French translation for her translation of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien.
Ouriou is a French and Spanish to English translator, a fiction writer and a playwright. She has previously won the Governor General's Literary Award in 2009 for her translation of Charlotte Gingras's Pieces of Me, which was published in French as La liberté? Connais pas. She has been shortlisted for the award six other times. Ouriou lives in Calgary.
"There's still a huge French community in that area, in southern Ontario, the area of Windsor and also in the Michigan area — so the French never left in reality — but my idea was that it never became American," Leroux said on The Next Chapter.
"So basically in my world, Detroit or Fort Détroit is the second biggest francophone city in North America after Montreal. So that's the setting. I think that as soon as I started being interested in the history of Detroit, it went without saying that I would have to delve into that."
It was a nice way to rewrite history and rewrite the history of language at the same time.- Catherine Leroux
"Then it was also for novelistic reasons because I wanted to be able to write dialogue that felt closer to the dialects and the French that I hear around me.
"If I'm writing about English characters, but I'm writing their dialogue into French, then it can't really take that shape. So it was a nice way to rewrite history and rewrite the history of language at the same time."
The importance of translation
O'Neill is excited to be championing a book in translation and plans to talking about how different Quebec writing is in terms of storytelling conventions.
"Sometimes, if you've read a book in translation you might just think it's mad," she said. "But it's like, 'No, that's how Quebec writes and the images and ideas and the musicality of it all."
Despite being bilingual, O'Neill was happy to have read The Future first in English, because then she was able to judge it as a translation. She's since read it in French and commends translator Susan Ouriou for her work.
"Catherine Leroux is someone who's really hard to translate because her work is so layered and metaphorical and imagistic and strange and experimental," she said.
Catherine Leroux is someone who's really hard to translate because her work is so layered and metaphorical and imagistic and strange and experimental.- Heather O'Neill
A translator in her own right, Leroux was slightly concerned about how well The Future would translate to English.
"I had paid such close attention to the way the language and the dialect was constructed that I didn't really know whether or not the translator would be able to deal with it," Leroux told CBC Books. "Because there's one thing that's untranslatable: I have Francophone characters living in Detroit. The book is going to be in English, so you're going to lose that."
"But then when I read Susan's translation, I felt like there had been no loss at all. Because she really made it her own and had her own way of like transposing those linguistic oddities."
"It was a lot of fun and quite a challenge," said Ouriou about working with said oddities in an interview with CBC Books. A veteran translator, she's excited to see one join the great book debate.
"I think so many people don't realize that a lot of our culture is based on books and reading of languages that we wouldn't have been able to read on our own. And at this time especially, we do need to be speaking to each other and listening to each other."
