Hubert Aquin
1929 -1977

"I am not writing, I am written." - Prochain Episode, 67.

Born in Montreal in 1929, Hubert Aquin worked in film, radio and television before becoming a novelist. His novel Prochain Episode (1965) is sometimes reminiscent of a James Bond movie although it deals with far more profound themes related to a writer's sense of being trapped in historical circumstances. His narrator writes, "I can no longer live with my feet on this cursed earth and my head bent to our national dungeon as if it were nothing" (29). The self-destructive thoughts of the narrator foreshadow Aquin's own death by suicide in 1977.

Aquin, Hubert. Prochain Episode. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972.

"Aquin, Hubert (1929 - )." Supplement to The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature. Ed. William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Dinka, Nicholas. "The mysterious Hubert Aquin." Books in Canada. Sept. 2003: 9.