Born near Quebec City (Canada) Gaëtan Brulotte studied 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 renown French critic, Roland Barthes (on modern French Erotic Literature). His dissertation's defense jury included Julia Kristeva and Jean Bellemin-Noël.
He has authored over a dozen books so far. Please click on Books or Bibliography for a short presentation of these books and some critical feedback on them. Click here for his abridged Curriculum vitae. As an award-winning and widely anthologized Francophone creative writer, he has published a novel L'Emprise (translated as Double Exposure) and four 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 a play Le Client (Music Maker), which was premiered at the Avignon Drama Festival in France in 2001 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 Tamul, as well as featured in numerous anthologies and textbooks. Some were published in magazines from different parts of the world, including 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. He has given around two hundred interviews on television, radio, for scholarly books and in periodicals concerning his works, including in the US, Playboy and Quebec Studies.
As a scholar, he has published extensively on 20th & 21st Century French and Francophone Literature (especially Quebec Literature), as well as on marginalized French literary genres (such as the Erotic & Quebec short story). His critical studies have appeared as chapters of numerous books and in countless international journals such as in France: Poétique, Revue des Sciences Humaines, Revue des Deux Mondes, Travaux de littérature, L'Arc, Revue d'esthétique, Médium, Atelier du Roman; in England: Paragraph; in Romania: Dialogues francophones (Romania); in New Zealand: Otago French Notes; in Canada: Etudes Littéraires, Liberté, XYZ, Les Ecrits, The University of Toronto Quarterly; in the USA: The Comparatist, Etudes francophones,The French Review, Sites, 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 contemporary 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 with a foreword by internationally renowned writer Anne Hébert. With a British colleague 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 project involved around 400 hundred of contributors from different parts of the world. His most recent book offers the very first extensive survey of 150 years of short story production in French Quebec and is titled La Nouvelle québécoise: this scholarly book unearthes many fascinating unknown short story writers from the past that deserve to be brought into light. This critical essay fills a major gap in this literary field and tries to contribute to the history of the genre by defining the place in world literature of this overlooked and very original production.
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. In 2012, a Romanian scholar, Margareta Gyurcsik, has finished a book in French on his work , which is titled: Gaëtan Brulotte ou la lucidité en partage. .
Throughout his career he has given well over two hundred presentations (in French and English) in his field, either at regional, national and international conferences, several of which as featured speaker at diverse institutions or on tours. He also regularly serves on literary juries and on advisory committees for journals and publishing firms, the latest being for the most prestigious literary ward in Canada: The General Governor Literary Award -for Essays) in 2012.
Gaetan Brulotte is a member of many professional associations, including the International PEN Club, the UNEQ (Union des des Ecrivaines et Ecrivains québécois, Montreal), the ADELF (Association des Ecrivains de langue française, Paris), the SACD (Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Dramaturges, Paris), the EAT (Ecrivains Associés du Théâtre, Paris), and frequently served on the board of directors of writers' societies (including the presidency of a French Canadian Writers' Society). He is figured in many national and international Who's Who publications.
He taught French & Francophone Literature at numerous universities in Canada, the United States, and France (on exchange), 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). He is currently Distinguished University Professor of French & Francophone Literature at the University of South Florida in Tampa, USA.
In his works he strives to bring more insights, meaning and beauty to the world.