Marie-Claire Blais CC OQ MSRC (5 October 1939 – 30 November 2021) was a Canadian writer, novelist, poet, and playwright from the province of Quebec.

In a career spanning seventy years, she wrote novels, plays, collections of poetry and fiction, newspaper articles, radio dramas, and scripts for television.

Some of her works included La Belle Bête (1959), The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange (1968), Deaf to the City (1979), and a ten-volume series Soifs written between 1995 and 2018.

[3] At the age of seventeen, she enrolled in a few classes at Université Laval, where she met professor and literary critic Jeanne Lapointe and priest and sociologist Georges-Henri Lévesque, both of whom encouraged her to write.

For about twenty years she divided her time between Montréal, the Eastern Townships of Québec and Key West, Florida, where she maintained her permanent home.

The series was set in an island town modeled on Key West and featured an interlocked cast of over a hundred characters including drag queens, painters, writers, and barflies, many of them based on acquaintances that she had made on the island where she had been a part of a community that included a journalist and novelist John Hersey and poet James Merrill.

[3][7] In addition to her novels, Blais has written several plays, collections of poetry and fiction, newspaper articles, radio dramas, and scripts for television.