Nancy Huston

Nancy Louise Huston, OC (born September 16, 1953) is a Canadian-born novelist and essayist who writes primarily in French and translates her own works into English.

Biography

Huston was born in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada, the city in which she lived until age fifteen, at which time her family moved to Wilton, New Hampshire, where she attended High Mowing School. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College in New York City, 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.

After many years of marriage to Tzvetan Todorov, with whom she had two children, Huston now shares her life with Swiss painter Guy Oberson.

Career

Because French was a language acquired at school and university, 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 45 books of fiction and non-fiction, including theatre and children's books. Some of her publications are self-translations of previously published works. Essentially she writes in French and subsequently self-translates into English but Plainsong (1993) was written first in English and then self-translated to French as Cantique des plaines (1993) - it was, however, the French version which first found a publisher.