In 1972, Turgeon won first prize for Dramatic Works at the CBC for The Interview, which he wrote with Jacques Godbout.

This radio play served as inspiration for the feature-length movie La Gammick (1975), starring Marc Legault [fr], Julien Poulin, Serge Thériault and Dorothée Berryman.

It gave birth to the controversial film The October Crisis produced by the CBC and Radio-Canada and directed by Mark Blandford.

In 1981, his talent as a novelist was recognized with the release of The First Person which received the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction.

The family of PH Desrosiers got a judicial ban against the biography Turgeon wrote on Maurice Duplessis.

L'Affaire Turgeon, as it is called, brought the repeal of Article 35 of the Civil Code of Quebec in 2002, which prohibited publishing the biography of a deceased person without the consent of his heirs.