Pierre Turgeon
- Writer
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.
