Roch Carrier was born to Georges and Marie-Anna Tanguay Carrier on 13 May 1937. His birthplace, the village of Sainte-Justine-de-Dorchester, southeast of Quebec City near the Maine border, is the setting for much of his fiction. His family were originally stonecutters and church builders (whence the name), and his father, from whom he says he gets his gift of humor, was a salesman. After local schooling (described in Les Enfants du bonhomme dans la lune, 1979), he studied at Collège Saint-Louis in New Brunswick, then at l'Université de Montréal, where he took a B.A. in French literature and wrote an M.A. thesis on Apollinaire in 1961. It was at the university that he began to write and have his first poems and short stories published. From 1961-1964 he studied in Paris, preparing a doctoral thesis on the French poet Blaise Cendrars. On his return to...