Michel Basilières

Basilières, the son of a Québécois father and an English Canadian mother, grew up as an anglophone despite his French surname.^[2] He studied creative writing at Concordia University, but dropped out before graduating, and spent much of his adult life working in bookstores in both Montreal and Toronto.^[1]

Black Bird was published in 2003 as part of Knopf Canada's New Faces of Fiction series of works by emerging writers.^[3] A comic, magic realist take on the October Crisis of 1970,^[3] the novel won the 2004 Books in Canada First Novel Award,^[4] and was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour^[5] and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Novel.^[4]

Following his award win, Basilières was a freelance book reviewer for the Toronto Star, the National Post and The Globe and Mail, and taught creative writing at the University of Toronto.

His second novel, A Free Man, published in 2015,^[6] was a ReLit Award finalist in 2016.

• Black Bird. Vintage Books. 2003. ISBN 978-0-676-97528-4.
• A Free Man. a misFit book. 2015. ISBN 978-1-770-41233-0.