Daniel Poliquin will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa,at the 2:00 p.m. ceremony on Friday, June 16, “in recognition of his brilliant work as novelist, short story writer, translator, interpreter and thought leader through political essays and non-fiction works.”
Born in Ottawa in 1953, Poliquin is a prolific Franco-Ontarian novelist, essayist and literary translator.
He won the Trillium Book Award in 1998 with his novel The Straw Man and his novel A Secret Between Us was short-listed for the 2007 Giller Prize.
Poliquin has translated many writers into French, including Jack Kerouac, Mordecai Richler, Douglas Glover, Thomas King and John R. Saul. He received the Governor General’s Award for translation in 2014 for T. King’s The Inconvenient Indian.
Poliquin’s book on Quebec nationalism, In the Name of the Father, earned the 2002 Shaugnessy Cohen Award for best political writing in Canada. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa. He is an officer of the Order of Canada and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des arts et lettres of France.