Mavis Leslie Gallant, née Mavis Leslie Young born on August 11, 1922. An only child, Gallant was born in Montreal, Quebec. Her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried. Gallant received her education at seventeen different public, convent, and French-language boarding schools. In her twenties, she worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard (1944-1950). She married John Gallant, a Winnipeg musician in 1942. The couple divorced five years later in 1947. Gallant left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing.

Gallant has been forthright about the protectiveness she feels towards her autonomy and privacy. In an interview with Geoff Hancock in Canadian Fiction magazine in 1978, she discussed her “life project” and her deliberate move to France to write by saying, “I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It's what I like doing.” In the preface to her collection of stories, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), she uses the words of Boris Pasternak as her epigraph: “Only personal independence matters.”

In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature; that year, she received the Governor General's Award for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada to be the writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. in 1991. She was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada in 1993.

In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her.

With Alice Munro, Gallant is one of a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appear in The New Yorker. Many of Gallant’s stories have debuted in the magazine before subsequently being published in a collection.

Current lifeAlthough she maintains her Canadian citizenship, Gallant has

lived in Paris, France since the 1950s. Gallant's life in Paris is spent writing her stories and in participating in the occasional gallery opening and gala opening night exhibits. She assiduously reads daily newspapers in German, Italian, French, and English, and had occasionally (and reluctantly) granted an interview until 2006, when she participated in two feature-length television documentaries: one in English for Bravo! television titled Paris

Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant and one in French, as part of a series entitled CONTACT, l’encyclopédie de la création, hosted by Canadian broadcaster Stéphan Bureau. Gallant was honored at Symphony Space in New York City on November 1, 2006, in an event for Selected Shorts -- fellow authors Russell Banks, Jhumpa Lahiri and Michael Ondaatje honored her and read excerpts from her work, and Gallant herself made a rare personal appearance, reading one of her short stories in its entirety.

On November 8 2006, Mavis Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David from the government of her native province of Quebec. She is the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.