Winning the 1961 Prix du Cercle du Livre de France for her first novel, Le Temps des jeux, at the age of twenty-four made Diane Giguère an overnight success. She was hailed as the Françoise Sagan of Quebec and, because of its departure from values and images traditionally upheld in Quebec literature, her novel was seen as exemplary of the spirit of the Quiet Revolution which was beginning to unfold in the province.

Giguère was born in Montreal on 6 December 1937. She is the granddaughter of Jean-Charles Harvey, an important liberal figure in the Quebec newspaper world and author of several short stories and novels, and the daughter of the prominent and controversial senator Louis Giguère and his wife, the former Carmen Harvey. Diane Giguère abandoned her classical studies at the Collège Marie-de-France at the age of sixteen...