Huston, Nancy

▪ Canadian author

born Sept. 16, 1953, Calgary, Alberta, Can.

      Canadian novelist and nonfiction author who wrote in French and English and made prizewinning translations of her own works, which explore the themes of cultural dislocation and personal identity.

      As a child, Huston lived in Canada, Germany, and the United States. She left Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., to attend the École des Hautes Études in Paris, where she studied linguistics and semiotics with the French philosopher and critic Roland Barthes (Barthes, Roland). She was active in the women's movement in the 1970s and taught at Columbia University's Institute for Feminist Studies in Paris in the 1980s. Following Barthes's death in 1980, she focused on writing novels. She continued to live and work in France, and she married Franco-Bulgarian literary theorist and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov.

      While she garnered attention with nonfiction works that were sometimes controversial, it was Huston's fiction that drew critical acclaim. Her first novel, Les Variations Goldberg (1981; The Goldberg Variations), was short-listed for the Prix Femina (Prix Fémina). The ease with which Huston moved between French and English characterized much of her career, and in 1993 she was awarded the Governor General's Award for best French-language novel for Cantique des plaines (1993). However, her receipt of the award drew some criticism owing to Huston having composed the novel in English, under the title Plainsong, before translating it into French. Her subsequent novels include Virevolte (1994; Slow Emergencies), L'Empreinte de l'ange (1998; The Mark of the Angel), and Dolce agonia (2001; Eng. trans. Dolce Agonia). She won the Prix Femina again, for Lignes de faille (2006), a translation into French of her novel Fault Lines, originally written in English but not published in that language until 2007.

* * *