Tempted by suicide for a great part of his existence, he ended his life in 1977 in the gardens of Villa Maria College.

[8] For the NFB, he notably worked on the film À l'heure de la décolonisation, directed by Monique Fortier, which led Aquin to interview in 1962 figures of decolonization such as Albert Memmi (with whom he formed a friendship),[9] Messali Hadj, Octave Mannoni and Olympe Bhêly-Quenum.

The images from the film will be used to illustrate several passages of the NFB documentary Deux épisodes dans la vie d'Hubert Aquin by Jacques Godbout.

[14] In 1969, he was hired by the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM),[15] but he resigned in 1970, saying he disagreed with the policy of Rector Léo A.

[19] He lost his job in August 1976: he was fired following the publication of an open letter denouncing the cultural policies of Éditions La Presse towards Quebec works.

[20] After the victory of the Parti Québécois in 1976, Aquin hoped to obtain a position within the government, such as Deputy Minister of Cultural Affairs, which did not come to fruition.

[24] He also included car racing in a film he made in 1961, Le Sport et les Hommes[25] (on which Roland Barthes collaborated), and the novel Next Episode.

It was at Radio-Canada that he met his future wife, Thérèse Larouche, a script girl for his friend Louis-Georges Carrier.

Born in Tunis to a half-Sicilian, half-Greek father and a French mother, Yanacopoulo graduated in medicine and sociology.

She then prepared a thesis on suicide and researched "Depression among French Canadians in Montreal", supervised by Guy Rocher, a sociologist, and Camille Laurin, a psychiatrist and future pro-independence minister under René Lévesque.

According to Guylaine Massoutre, these events "precipitated his political awareness and gave rise to his adherence to separatist ideology".

[12] In 1962, in the magazine Liberté, he published his most famous political text, La fatigue culturelle du Canada français, responding to an article published in Cité libre by Pierre Elliott Trudeau on the subject of independence: La nouvelle trahison des clercs.

On 19 June 1964, he publicly announced in a letter to the newspapers Le Devoir and Montréal-Matin that he was going "undercover" and becoming "commander of the Special Organization" with the aim of joining forces with the Front de libération du Québec[2] · [31] · .

[2] He meets Dr. Pierre Lefebvre, a psychiatrist and contributor to Parti pris,[2] who, on 26 June, concludes that immediate treatment is necessary due to a "nervous breakdown".

[33] On 5 July, Aquin is arrested by a plainclothes police officer in a stolen car, in possession of a revolver, in a parking lot behind the Saint Joseph's Oratory.

Two charges were brought against him: "theft and posession of stolen goods" and "possession of an offensive weapon for a dangerous purpose".

[29] On 19 November, on behalf of the Federal Foreigners Police, the canton of Vaud refused him a residence permit that he needed to live in Nyon.

[38] During 1969, he denounced the decision to dissolve the RIN in favor of René Lévesque's Mouvement Souveraineté-Association, and left the party.

The first edition sold out in two and a half months, and, in Le Devoir, the literary critic Jean Éthier-Blais ended his article about the book by exclaiming: "We do not have to look any further.

That year, he resigned from the editorial board of Liberté because, he said, the magazine had ignored the events of the October Crisis of 1970 in order to avoid losing funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.

I have lived intensely, it is over.Regarded in English Canada as a classic of Canadian literature, Aquin's novel Next Episode (the English translation of Prochain épisode by Sheila Fischman), was chosen for the 2003 edition of CBC Radio's Canada Reads competition, where it was championed by journalist Denise Bombardier.

The Hubert-Aquin building at the Université du Québec à Montréal (built from 1975 to 1979) is named in his (posthumous) honour.

[40] In 1979, the Quebec writer and filmmaker Jacques Godbout made a documentary entitled Two episodes in the life of Hubert Aquin.