Dyane Léger

Biography

Born in 1954 in Notre-Dame-de-Kent, Dyane Léger devotes herself to her work of visual and literary art. The first woman to be published in Acadia, her inaugural work, Graines de fée, was published in 1980. Sometimes violent, sometimes playful, this poetic prose so struck readers with its quality and force that the work won the France-Acadie prize. upon its publication (it was reissued in 1987).

Since 1980, Dyane Léger has published five other works: Visages de femmes (1987) is a collaboration between the author and Corinne Gallant. Photos of women of all ages, taken by Gallant, alternate with Léger’s poetic stories where first-person narrators, from childhood to old age, express their desire to be fully women, beyond the world of fairy tales, beyond the myths and phallogocentric stories imprisoning women in their feminine roles as fallen seductress, devoted mother or hysterical madwoman. It is the voice of the septuagenarian on which the collection ends which teaches us that “slowly, [she] begins to know how to live” (46). Sorcière de vent (1983), Les anges en transit (1992), Comme un boxeur dans une cathédrale (1996) and Le dragon de la dernière heure (1999) are collections of poems strictly speaking (Comme un boxeur dans une cathédrale), dreamlike stories (Sorcière de vent), poetic travel stories in Russia and New Orleans, trips during which the narrator manages to deepen her knowledge of herself through contact with others (Les anges en transit); the various texts from Le dragon de la dernière heure – poems, micro-stories, letters addressed in turn to Michel, to the dragon tamer, to the dragon, to the dear distant one, etc. – once again develop the thematic cores dear to the poet: the past and the present, the marvelous and violence, reality and dreams. In 2008, Léger published with Paul Savoie L’incendiaire, poetic prose written “à quatre mains” (four hands) which exploits the topos of fire.

Finalist for the Estuaire Literary Prize (1996), recipient on several occasions from the Canada Council for the Arts and the NB Arts Council, member of the French-language jury for the Governor General’s Prize for Poetry (2001), Dyane Léger is also well known for her visual art exhibitions in Canada, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and France.

*(Source: Mount Allison University)