Deprived of cultural outings or evenings with friends for months of confinement, Quebecers have turned to reading local authors.
Fewer novelties on the shelves but more books in the baskets: from children’s literature to comics, via novels, Quebecers have rediscovered the pleasure of reading and especially their local authors in the wake of the pandemic.
Read alsoThe book market experienced unprecedented growth in 2021
Deprived of cultural outings or evenings with friends for months due to very strict confinement, the inhabitants of the French-speaking Canadian province, in an attempt to escape at least a little from the screens, read more than before the crisis and especially put the hand to the purse. In 2021, book sales jumped by more than 16% in Quebec, particularly driven by sales of local authors (+ 18.3%), according to the Gaspard report, which compiles book market data. “There has been significant growth in Quebec books over the past few years, which has been accentuated over the past two years“, confirms to AFP Arnaud Foulon, president of the National Association of Book Publishers (ANEL).
Calls for local consumption therefore seem to have also affected books in Quebec, supported by the government’s “I read Quebec” campaign. The readers “wanted to choose books by local authors, local publishers, in a local bookstore“, opines Katherine Fafard, director general of the Association of booksellers of Quebec (ALQ). They preferred that literature described by experts as “very North American but in a French language“, sensitive to “autofiction», «the reality of the natives” Where “ecology“.
Read alsoHow Quebec booksellers are resisting competition from Amazon
On the site of independent bookstores in Quebec, 45 of the 50 best-selling titles in 2021 are from Quebec, and more than half have appeared this year. At the top of the podium, the Native American author Michel Jean with his book kukum (Libre Expression, 2019), has three other novels on the list. For him, his novels also have “benefited from a context related to the Aboriginal issue”, which has made headlines in Canada in recent months, in particular because of macabre discoveries around residential schools for indigenous people. These institutions, where some 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly enrolled between the end of the 19th century and the 1990s, cut them off from their families, language and culture. This dark page in Canadian history has been brought back to light after the uncovering in recent months of more than a thousand unmarked graves near some of these former residential schools.
Read alsoJustin Trudeau calls on Canadians to acknowledge the wrongs done to Indigenous peoples
“Quality»
The increase in book sales also demonstratesthe quality of current Quebec literature“, Underlines the writer Michel Jean, interviewed by AFP. So to meet this growing demand, booksellers have left these books on display for longer. Also constrained by the realities of the sector. Quebec publishers, which usually publish 6,000 new releases each year, have seriously reduced the airfoil with releases down 19% in 2020 compared to 2019. The sector, like others in Canada, must indeed juggle shortages: that of labor which affects the entire chain and that, worldwide, of paper caused by Covid-19 and which is driving up prices.
But that does not discourage Olivier Hamel, forty years old, who defines himself as a “compulsive book buyerand frequents the independent bookstore in Verdun, a neighborhood in southwest Montreal, every week. He now believes that “30 or 40%» of his purchases are Quebec books. “It excites me: I find that we have really fantastic writers, cartoonists, so I try to encourage thementhuses this school librarian. Same “infatuation» for Stéphanie Gibeau, 37, who works in IT and believes that there are a lot of «talented authors“. Today she reads half of Quebec books, more than some time ago, especially on the advice of her bookseller. According to the latter, Billy Robinson, the fallout from this year “quite exceptionalare raining down on all genres: children’s literature, adult literature, essays, fiction… And the Quebec book is also exported more: according to Arnaud Foulon, it has not “never sold so many Quebec book rights on the international scene, particularly in France and Germany, where Canada was the guest of honorof the Frankfurt Book Fair, the biggest event of its kind.