The Quebec writer, literary critic, essayist and poet Normand de Bellefeuille died Monday at the age of 74.

He won the Governor General’s Poetry Award for The Blind Man’s Walk Without His Dog in 2000 and won the Athanase-David Prize in 2017, among many other distinctions. He has written more than thirty titles since his novel Monsieur Isaac, published in 1973. In 2020, he published the collection Histoire du vent, with Éditions du Noroît.

Normand de Bellefeuille also held the position of literary director at QuébecAmérique from 1997 to 2010, before exercising the same functions at Éditions Druide.

As a publisher, he enabled young authors like Jean-François Beauchemin, François Désalliers, Stéphane Dompierre, Michel Vézina and even the poet Catherine Lalond to be published.

The writer Alain Beaulieu paid tribute on Facebook to his “accomplice from the early days” for the publishing of his books, adding that he accompanied him all the way, since his first novel, Fou-Bar , in 1997 until Visions by Manuel Mendoza, a few years ago.