Guèvremont, Germaine, 1893-1968 : Novelist and journalist Germaine Guèvremont was born in Saint-Jérôme on April 16, 1893. Through her father, Joseph-Jérôme Grignon, she is a cousin of Claude-Henri Grignon, and through her mother, Valentine Labelle, she is related to Curé Labelle. After studies at the Sainte-Scholastique school, the Sisters of Sainte-Anne boarding school in Saint-Jérôme, the Sisters of Sainte-Anne boarding school in Lachine, and Loretto Abbey in Toronto, she returned to Sainte-Scholastique, where she worked as a court reporter. In 1913, she published her first articles, some of them under the pseudonym "Janrhêve," in various newspapers, including Le Canada and La Patrie. In 1916, she married Hyacinthe Guévremont, with whom she had five children. After living in Ottawa for four years, the couple moved to Sorel, where they lived from 1920 to 1935. In 1928, Germaine Guèvremont became Sorel correspondent for the Montreal Gazette and editor of the Courrier de Sorel. In 1935, she moved to Montréal, where she again worked as a court reporter, and, from 1938 onwards, she wrote articles, stories and tales for the magazine Paysana, founded by Françoise Gaudet-Smet, with whom she authored a column under the pseudonym "La Passante." It was then that she adopted her pen name, Germaine Guèvremont, not Guévremont, which is the spelling of her husband's surname. Also in 1938, Victor Barbeau appointed her head of the secretariat of the Société des écrivains canadiens, a position she held until 1948. Between 1940 and 1942, she contributed to the magazine L'¿il under the pseudonym "La femme du postillon." A collection of her best stories, En pleine terre, was published in 1942. Encouraged by the poet Alfred Desrochers, she developed the world of her tales into a novel, Le Survenant, which she self-published in 1945. The novel became a classic of French-Canadian literature, earning her the Prix Duvernay, the Prix David, the Prix de l'Académie française (1946), and fame. In 1947, a year after Le Survenant was published by Plon in Paris, she was also awarded the Prix Sully-Olivier de Serres. That same year, she received the Prix de l'Académie canadienne-française for her second novel, Marie-Didace. The two novels were translated into English by Eric Sutton and published together in 1950 as The Monk's Reach for British readers and as The Outlander for American and Canadian readers (Governor General's Award, 1950). Following the success of her two novels, she was asked to adapt them for radio and television, a task to which she devoted herself from 1947 to 1965, while continuing to write numerous articles for magazines and newspapers. Shortly before her death, she wrote the screenplay for the film L'adieu aux îles, broadcast on the Radio-Canada television network, and published two autobiographical pieces, one in Le Devoir and the other in Chatelaine, intended as the initial parts of a memoir, which was never finished. Germaine Guèvremont died in Montréal on August 21, 1968.
