Born near Quebec City (Canada) Gaëtan Brulotte studied French and Francophone literature at Laval University (Quebec City), and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Paris VII -Ecole des hautes Etudes en Sciences sociales (France), under the direction of renowned French critic, Roland Barthes (on French Erotic Literature). His dissertation's defense jury included Julia Kristeva and Jean Bellemin-Noël. Click this link for accessing Full Vita
He has authored some 15 books so far. Please click on Books or Bibliography for a short presentation of these books and critical feedback on them. As an award-winning and widely anthologized Francophone creative writer, he has also published a novel L'Emprise (translated as Double Exposure) and five collections of short stories, Le Surveillant (translated as The Secret Voice), Ce qui nous tient (What Holds Us), Epreuves (Testing), La Vie de biais (Life Sideways), and La contagion du réel. His play Le Client (Music Maker) was premiered at the Avignon Drama Festival in France in 2001 (with a grant from the French Ministry of Culture) and restaged afterwards. His fiction works won over fifteen literary awards. Some were also adapted for cinema, television, stage and radio.
In both his fiction and non-fiction works, Brulotte has always tried so far to bring fresh air on the literary scene with his constant search for innovation. His fiction works are translated into several languages, including English, Italian, Spanish, German, Serbian, Romanian, Hungarian and Tamil (India), as well as featured in some 30 anthologies and textbooks (including at Cambridge UP, Penguin Books, Bordas, Houghton-Mifflin, Heinle & Heinle). Some were published in periodicals of various countries, such as Cleo in Australia, Châtelaine in Canada, Brèves in France, Puerto del Sol in the USA, Les Cahiers du Ru in Italy, Steaua in Romania, Knjizevne Novine in former Yugoslavia, Magyar Naplozi in Hungary. Concerning his works and his vision of literature, education and culture, he has given so far around 200 interviews, whether on television -including recently at MATV and Vox Television, Canada-; on radio, such as Radio VM, CIBL-FM & Radio-Canada; for periodicals, such as Lingua Romana and Quebec Studies (USA), Les Cahiers de l'AQPF (Canada), Focus Magazine in Italy, Dialogues francophones (Romania), as well as for scholarly books or Internet sites. such as Playboy Magazine (US), Cybercontact (Canada) and Observator Cultural (Romania), including in 2017 with Elena-Brandusa Steiciuc for her book Francophonie et diversité.
As a scholar, he has published extensively on 18th c. and 20th & 21st c. French and Francophone Literature (especially Quebec Literature), as well as on marginalized French literary genres (such as the Erotic & the short story). His critical studies have appeared as chapters of numerous books and in countless international refereed journals such as in France: Atelier du Roman, Poétique, Revue des Sciences Humaines, Revue des Deux Mondes, Travaux de littérature, L'Arc, Revue d'esthétique, Médium; in England: Paragraph; in Romania: Dialogues francophones; in New Zealand: Otago French Notes; in Canada: Etudes Littéraires, Liberté, XYZ, Québec français, Les Ecrits, The University of Toronto Quarterly; in the USA: The Comparatist, Etudes francophones,The French Review, Sites, Stanford French and Italian Studies, to name a few. Besides his critically acclaimed Oeuvres de chair. Figures du discours érotique (1998), the very first in-depth study of a genre that was notoriously despised by the academia, his scholarly books include his critical essays on modern French literature Les Cahiers de Limentinus. Lectures fin de siècle, published in 1998, and his reflexion on literature and creative writing, La Chambre des lucidités in 2003. Commentators have also noticed that he has renewed art criticism in his cultural study on a major Canadian painter, L'Univers de Jean Paul Lemieux published in 1996 (& revised in 2015 for its 2nd ed.) with a foreword by internationally renowned writer Anne Hébert. With a British colleague (a translator of Sade, Oxford Up) he has co-edited an Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature (New York: Routledge, 2006), the very first work to offer a comprehensive description of those innumerable works, written in many different languages throughout our known history, in which ‘sex-talk’ is the dominant discourse. This two-volume reference book involved over 200 hundred contributors from different parts of the world. His critical history of short story production in French Quebec over 150 years and titled La Nouvelle québécoise, unearthes many fascinating unknown short story writers from the past that deserve to be brought into light. This critical book fills a major gap in this literary field and tries to redefine the place in world literature of this overlooked and very original production.
Throughout his career he has given well over 200 invited presentations (in French and English) in his field, either at regional, national and international conferences (such as Cerisy-la-Salle in France) or as featured speaker on tours or at a variety of institutions (such as Princeton U., Columbia U., Georgetown U., Rutgers U., Birbeck College-London, Iasi & Suceava U. in Romania, Bar Ilan U, Haifa U., Hebrew U. and Institut français of Jerusalem, U. Chulalonghorn & Thammasat in Bangkok). His lecture tours include France, Morocco, Israel, and Central Europe. He has received over 350 grants and contracts. He also regularly serves on literary juries (such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, or in 2012 the prestigious Governor of Canada Literary Award) and on editorial board of journals and as reviewer for publishing firms (such as Oxford UP, Yale UP, The American Philosophical Society, Pluto Press, Palgrave Macmillan, and the U. of Toronto P).
Over the years, Brulotte's publications received some 15 literary awards and hundreds of favorable reviews world-wide, including in the Time Literary Supplement (England), L’Humanité, Littératures (France), The French Review (USA), Lettres romanes (Belgium), Le Devoir, Voir, Québec français, Globe, Le Soleil, La Presse, The Globe and Mail (Canada), Transcanadiana (Poland), to name a few. He made the cover of the 2005 winter issue of the Canadian literary magazine Lettres québécoises. Brulotte's work is attracting more and more critical attention every year: book reviews, articles, theses, and is subject of courses at a number of colleges and universities world-wide, as well as of communications and sessions at conferences. These critical activities around his works include a monograph entitled Gaëtan Brulotte: Une Nouvelle Ecriture edited by Claudine Fisher (NY: Mellen, 1992), a collection of critical essays by seventeen scholars, a book that won in Strasbourg (France) the 1992 International Prize for Francophone Studies. A Romanian scholar, Margareta Gyurcsik, has produced a 300p monograph in French on his work, which is titled: Gaëtan Brulotte ou la lucidité en partage (Montreal, Nota bene, 2018; won the Mention d'Excellence, Prix de la Société des Ecrivains Francophones d'Amérique, 2018), while a Canadian scholar, Steven Urquhart (U of Lethbridge), has devoted a chapter to his work in a book (Nota bene, 2013) and an Italian scholar, Antonio Rinaldis (U. of Milan), has published a philosophical reading of his writings in Philosopher (2013). In 2013, the French Government made him Chevalier dans l'ordre des Palmes académiques (Knight of the Order of Academic Palms) for his contribution to French education and culture. In 2016-17, he received a Fulbright Award from the US Government for literary research in Israel.
He taught French & Francophone Literature at numerous universities in Canada, the United States, and France, including the University of Québec at Trois-Rivières, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of New Mexico, the Stendhal University (Grenoble III) in France and the Sorbonne (Paris V). In 2005 he became Distinguished University Professor of French & Francophone Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa (USA) and in 2015-16 this institution made him Emeritus. Starting January 2016 he took on the senior position of "Board of Regents Humanities Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair" & Professor of Francophone Studies at the U. of Louisiana at Lafayette in the USA.
Gaetan Brulotte is a member of many professional associations, including the MLA, the International PEN Club, the UNEQ (Union des Ecrivains québécois, Montreal), the SACD (Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Dramaturges, Paris), the EAT (Ecrivains Associés du Théâtre, Paris). He is figured in many national and international Who's Who publications.
In his works he strives to bring more insights, self-awareness, empathy, and meaning to the world, caught that he feels as a writer between suffering and beauty.