Marie-Louise Gay: Canada Illustrator

Children are so open, and their link between fantasy and reality is so fragile. I'm always amazed by what they will and won't believe.

Marie-Louise Gay

Marie-Louise Gay was born in 1952 in Quebec City, moving around Canada with her family in her early years, living in Montreal and Vancouver. Out of her bored doodles in the classroom grew a real talent that later led her to a career in art. She reveals, "In my preteen and teenage years I mainly read bandes dessinées, which are illustrated stories like long cartoon strips. The most well-known being Tintin, Babar, Bécassine or Astérix; but, less well-known, at least in the English world, are the works of F'Murr, René Gotlib, etc., which were featured in the magazine Pilote. The drawings were surrealistic, crazy, extraordinarily avant-garde. The design was to die for. The texts were very exciting, intellectual, funny, and ironic."

She sold illustrations and cartoons to magazines while attending art school in Montreal and San Francisco. Later, her work with a publisher in Montreal inspired her to write as well as illustrate books for children. She has written and/ or illustrated more than sixty books in both French and English. Besides books, she also works in theater and film. Her Stella series is being adapted into an animated series.

In her writing and her illustration, Gay creates appealing characters and the vivid places in which they live, laugh, and question. Her work is warm with domestic detail, wild with a whimsical imagination. Her affectionate attention to detail is evident whether portraying a young boy's stamp collection or Stella's red hair, which takes on a life of its own. With more than sixty books to her credit, she knows how to create visual worlds with extraordinary zest and energy. Through her use of evocative watercolor and relatable stories she has tapped into the emotional terrain so familiar to the world of childhood.

Marie-Louise Gay has received numerous awards for her written and illustrated works in both French and English; she is a four-time winner of the Governor General's Award for Children's Literature in Canada. Her well-loved Stella and Sam books have been published in more than twenty languages, from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean to Slovenian, Serbian, and German. She has two sons and currently lives in Montreal with her husband and frequent co-author, David Homel.