Gérard Bessette

He then found a job in Kingston, Ontario, first at Royal Military College of Canada in 1958, and then in the Department of French Studies at Queen's University from 1959 to 1979.

Bessette's novels L'incubation (1965) and Le cycle (1971) won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction (French).

Several of Bessette's works address issues that led to and were representative of the Révolution tranquille, a series of societal shifts that took place in Quebec during the 1960s, which saw increased secularization and a general movement away from the influence of the Catholic Church.

His earlier works are written in a realistic style, while his later novels utilize elements of the nouveau roman literary movement and tend to be more experimental.

One of his most noted works is Le libraire (1960), an existential tale of a book store employee in a small Quebec town in the 1950s.