Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922. In the early 1940s, she briefly worked for the National Film Board before becoming a reporter. She married a musician, John Gallant, but they were divorced before the end of the decade. Gallant moved to Paris and, apart from fleeting spells in London, Spain and back in Canada, lived there for the rest of her life – although she never renounced her Canadian citizenship. From 1951, the New Yorker published more than one hundred of her stories. Her body of prize-winning work includes a dozen collections of stories, two novels, a play and numerous essays and reviews. Green Water, Green Sky was her debut novel. She died in 2014.
