Page 28 - Trillium Book Awards 2021, ONTARIO CREATES

Trillium Book Award
Finalist
Nicole V. Champeau
Niagara... la voie qui y mène
Éditions David
In this personal yet solidly documented work, Nicole V. Champeau revisits the banks of the St. Lawrence River, that great river that explorers, discoverers, missionaries, soldiers, adventurers and so many other diverse others have travelled. She follows them up the St. Lawrence to Niagara and describes how moved she is by the poignant history of the upper St. Lawrence and all that we can understand about françois in that often-neglected Ontarian part of the river.
With a documentary yet poetic style, she tries to reconstruct the history and geography of this mythic place that, before becoming the tourist destination everyone knows, was a sacred centre for First Nations peoples and, thanks to courageous explorers like Cavelier de la Salle, became a part of Francophone cultural heritage.
Nicole V. Champeau is originally from Cornwall, Ontario. The St. Lawrence River remains the place of poetry that accompanied the seasons of her childhood and adolescence. Near the end of the 1960s, she left Cornwall to go to school in Ottawa, where she still lives today. In 2009, she won the non-fiction category of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Pointe Maligne, l’infiniment oubliée: Présence française dans le Haut-Saint-Laurent ontarien (Vermillon, 2009).
Jury Comment: In Niagara... la voie qui y mène, Nicole V. Champeau continues her trip on the St. Lawrence River to get to the famous falls, guiding her readers to discover the complex past and French heritage of this place that is too often associated with touristic kitsch. This essay full of images, poems and historical accounts highlights the first colonists’ inability to describe the utter majesty of this almost- mythical place in Ontario, while emphasizing the numerous events that have occurred on the river: the construction of Fort Niagara to the creation of Shredded Wheat cereal, among other things. Niagara... la voie qui y mène is the author’s love letter to those invigorating waters that have marked her own history and left a strong impression on all those who have been lost in its enchanting mist.
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