Alice Parizeau (1930–1990)

Alice Parizeau, OC, née Alicja Poznańska, was a Polish-Canadian writer, essayist, journalist and criminologist. Born in Łuniniec, Poland, into the family of a wealthy industrialist, she grew up in Krakow. As a teenager, she acted as a liaison officer for the underground Polish Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 during World War II. She was sent by the Germans to the Bergen-Belsen prisoner-of-war camp but survived. After the war, she went to Paris to pursue studies in the humanities, earning a certificate in political science and a law degree in 1953. In 1955, she visited a friend in Quebec, where she accepted a short contract that turned into a lifelong stay. The following year, she married Jacques Parizeau, an economist and politician (later Premier of Quebec) with whom she had two children, and moved in Montreal's intellectual and sovereignty movement circles. She became a well-known journalist, writing for newspapers and magazines such as Cité libre, La Presse, Châtelaine, Le Devoir, La Patrie and Maclean's. She also worked as a civil servant with the City of Montreal, a researcher for Société Radio-Canada, and a lecturer in the Department of Criminology at the Université de Montréal. Her earliest novels appeared in the 1960s, but she won fame for her semi-autobiographical trilogy beginning with Les lilas fleurissent à Varsovie (The Lilacs Are Blooming in Warsaw) in 1981, which won the Prix européen de l'Association des écrivains de langue française in 1982. The trilogy continued with La charge des sangliers (1982) and Ils se sont connus à Lwow (1985). Other works included Blizzard sur Québec (1987), and Nata et le professeur (1988), a love story intertwined with the Katyn Forest Massacre in World War II. In 1988, she was diagnosed with cancer and kept a diary that was published posthumously as Une femme (1991).