Bio

Photo credits: Amélie Philibert

Chantal Ringuet is a Canadian award-winning author and translator.

One of the most original voices of her generation in francophone Quebec, she is the author of a dozen books covering a wide range of subjects and genres: poetry, historical and cultural essays, biographical narratives and anthologies. Her work focuses on issues of memory and language crossing in urban space, translation, women's voices, Yiddish literature and Leonard Cohen. As a literary translator from English and Yiddish, she has brought to life in French the voices of Marc Chagall, Rachel Korn, Kadya Molodowsky and Adrienne Rich. In 2024, she held the position of Mordecai Richler Writer-in-Residence at McGill University's Department of French Literature, Translation and Creative Studies.

– Unfolding the thread of writing, in poetry and prose, revealing the traces of a living memory and its links with the imaginary, bringing to light the voices of those forgotten by history, until unprecedented subjective material emerges: such is the logic guiding my literary and artistic work.

In 2025, she launches the alternative metro map Montreal, City of Women. Montreal, City of Women, co-created with the Université de Montréal and in partnership with the STM. Following in the footsteps of New York, London and Barcelona, the Quebec metropolis becomes the 4th city in the world - and the first French-speaking city - to have its own “City of Women” metro map.

Her intellectual and artistic approach explores the relationship between text and mobility, migration and diaspora, uprootedness and feelings of exile, as well as the links between textures and textiles. Archives, visual works and photography play an essential role. Between collective history and family memory, Chantal Ringuet's writing carries echoes, traces and resonances of the sensitive: living ruins, buried traumas and forgotten secrets. Writer-in-residence at Reykjavik's Gröndalshus, UNESCO City of Literature (2019) for her Treelessness project, she will publish a collection of poetry inspired by this stay in 2025.

Her other achievements include acting as consultant for the exhibition Leonard Cohen. Une brèche en toute chose / Leonard Cohen. A Crack in Everything presented at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal in 2017-2018, which was the most-attended exhibition in the museum's history. With John Zeppetelli, Victor Shiffman and Sylvie Simmons, she also co-edited the exhibition catalog Leonard Cohen (MACM, 2018). With Pierre Anctil, Chantal Ringuet translated Marc Chagall's original autobiography from Yiddish into French from the artist's typescript, which she discovered in the YIVO archives in New York. Mon univers. Une autobiographie (Fides, 2017) by Marc Chagall was launched at the opening of the exhibition Chagall. Colors and Music at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the largest exhibition devoted to the artist in Canada.

Director of the podcast Écrire la fureur. Femmes poètes en traduction (on the respective works of Nicole Brossard and Adrienne Rich, 2022) carried out with the Literary Translators' Association of Canada and Littérature québécoise mobile, she curated the exhibition Reboisements at the Chapelle des Cuthbert, a literary and eco-sensitive project highlighting local heritage. The same year, the show Les seuils muets, featuring her poems (Forêt en chambre) and those of Marie-Claire Blais (Oeuvres complètes), was presented at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Québec.

Selected Interviews

Two-Axe Earley, Cree part of a metro project (Olivier Cadotte), The Eastern Door, March 2025.

Montreal Metro map reimagined to mark International Women's Day, CBC, March 7, 2025.

In Conversation with Chantal Ringuet, Faculty of Arts, McGill, 2024.

Chantal Ringuet Reyjavik City of Literature's Writer in Residence 2019.

I'm Your Man: Leonard Cohen Authors Roundtable at the Jewish Museum, New York, 2019.

The Translator Relay, Words Without Borders, 2019.

Interview When Translation Becomes Homage, Words Without Borders, 2018.

Literary Awards and Honours

Canadian Jewish Literary Award, cat. Jewish Thought and Culture, 2017

YIVO Fellow, New York, 2015-2016

Prix littéraire Jacques-Poirier, 2009

Research-Creation Grants (selection)

Grants from the Canada Council for the Arts (CAC)

Grant from the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec (CALQ)

Grant from the Conseil des arts de Montréal (CAM)

Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council (SHHRC)

Grant from the Fonds de recherche québécois en sciences et culture (FRQSC)

Academic Training

After studying literature and philosophy at l'UQÀM and the University of Montreal, Chantal Ringuet completed a Ph.D. in literary studies (FRQSC scholarship, Honorable Mention) specializing on contemporary women writers from Québec and including an internship in psychopathology at Université de Paris XIII. As postdoctoral research Fellow, she pursued her research on cultural pluralism and Yiddish literature at the University of Ottawa's Institute for the Study of Canada (SSHRC fellowship, 2007-2009). After teaching at university, she was enseignante-intervenante à l'Institut européen Emmanuel Lévinas de Paris (2014-2019), Visiting Fellow at YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research in New York (2015-2016) and Researcher in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (Brandeis University) in Massachusetts, for a documentary project on Yiddish poets Rachel (Rokhl) Korn and Kadya Molodowsky (2016).