The Year of My Disappearance by Carole David, Translated by Donald Winkler

Winner of the 2016 Prix des Libraires

Winner of the 2016 Quebecor Prize for the Trois-Rivières Poetry Festival

Carole David’s The Year of My Disappearance is a searing, surreal, darkly comic descent into a woman’s psyche. From Governor General’s Award winning translator, Donald Winkler, into English, comes this pitiless assault on the author’s own torments and pretenses. Present here are figures lodged in her memory: lovers, strangers, her mother, and Bosch-like apparitions out of her dreams and imaginings. Through it all, a fierce combat is being waged between immolation and survival. As David has written, “I gave free range to the lives that dwelt within me.” It’s down this road the blind spot sings.

Praise for The Year of My Disappearance:

“This sharp-witted poetry, knife blades at the ready, speaks of the landscape a woman may come to inhabit who is undone, overwhelmed by the violence to which any life is subject when weighed down by remembrances.”
—Hugues Corriveau, Le Devoir

Press Coverage of The Year of My Disappearance:

“Winkler’s translation beautifully evokes the interplay of the surreal, dread and dark humour in David’s work. The language is metaphysical yet at the same time graphic, earthy, colloquial.” —Frances Boyle, Canthius

“Drawing on Juliana Schiesari, the text shows how it is in moments of stark clarity that emerge from a sea of mundane and horrific images that David joins the feminist project of honouring women’s grief, all the more so as her poetry slips between “mine” and “our,” elusively referencing both a multiplicity of self and a collective “hallow[ing of] sorrow.” —Rebekah Ludolph, Canadian Literature

Poet, novelist, and short story writer, Carole David was born in Montreal, and holds a doctorate in French studies. She taught for many years at the college level. Her Manuel de poétique à l’ intention des jeunes filles (2010), won the Alain Grandbois Prize, and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Her most recent collection, L’année de ma disparition (2015), (The Year of my Disappearance), won the Prix des libraires, the Prix Québecor of the Trois Rivières International Poetry Festival, and was a finalist for the Grand prix de la ville de Montréal. She lives in Montreal, where she devotes herself to writing. Her books have been translated into English and Italian.

Donald Winkler is a translator of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for French to English translation, most recently in 2013 for Pierre Nepveu’s collection of verse, The Major Verbs. He lives in Montreal.