Acclaimed Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant has died at her Paris apartment aged 91.
"Without exaggeration she was one of the finest writers Canada has ever known," said her publisher Doug Pepper of McClelland & Stewart.
"Witty, brave, honest, fiercely independent, Mavis was a stunning writer who transformed the short fiction form."
Born Mavis Young in Montreal in 1922, the only child of a furniture salesman and his wife, she worked briefly in the cutting room of the National Film Board of Canada, then as a journalist at the now defunct daily Montreal Standard, before moving to Paris in 1950.
A year later, she began publishing stories on a regular basis in The New Yorker, contributing more than 100 stories to the magazine in her lifetime. She also published two novels and won several literary awards.
Her latest work, The Journals of Mavis Gallant is due out next year.
When she could afford it, Gallant reportedly travelled and recorded her observations about post-Second World War Europe in a notebook which she later consulted for dialogue or descriptions of settings for her stories.
Her tales often explored dislocation and alienation, using characters such as refugees or lost travellers, who are unhappy and have troubled or fragmented lives.
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