Michel Basilières (born 1960 in Montreal) is a Canadian writer, best known for his 2003 debut novel Black Bird.
[1] Basilières, the son of a Québécois father and an English Canadian mother, grew up as an anglophone despite his French surname.
[2] He studied creative writing at Concordia University, but dropped out before graduating, and spent much of his adult life working in bookstores in both Montreal and Toronto.
[1] Black Bird was published in 2003 as part of Knopf Canada's New Faces of Fiction series of works by emerging writers.
[3] A comic, magic realist take on the October Crisis of 1970,[3] the novel won the 2004 Books in Canada First Novel Award,[4] and was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour[5] and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Novel.