Pierre Turgeon

Born in Québec city, in 1947, Pierre Turgeon tried his luck at becoming an actor, in Hollywood, in 1966, and got his chance as an extra in 7 Women directed by John Ford. But he soon decided that his real vocation was in writing. In 1967, he returned to Montreal, where he started a prolific career as a journalist, novelist, historian, essayist, play writer and scenarist. He wrote his first movie in 1975, La Gammick, which tell the story of a hit-man from Montreal who accepts a contract in New York to kill a mafioso boss. He published 22 books, from 1969 to 2014, won two times the Governor General Ward (the Canadian Pulitzer)m for The First Person, a novel that take place in Los Angeles, and Radissonia, the history of the Great White North of Québec. In 1996, he found himself at the center of a political and cultural debate. The family of PH Desrosiers got a judicial ban against the biography Turgeon wrote on Maurice Duplessis. Following a fight in court for the publication of the biography, he obtained the support of more than thirty cultural, social, and trade union organizations, including UNEQ, the Writers Union of Canada, the Association of History Teachers, the Federation of Journalists, the CSN and the FTQ. 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. In 1993, Pierre Turgeon wrote the text of The Mighty River, directed by Frederick, which won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Animated Film. In 1993, it was nominated for the Oscar of the best animated film. He is presently working on the adaptation as a TV series of The Gammick.