Pierre Billon

Billon, Pierre

Pierre Billon, novelist (b at Geneva, Switzerland Jun 15 1937). Following studies in education at the Université de Montréal (1965), Pierre Billon taught at the Faculty of Arts there, and at the University of Ottawa. Then he was head of educational publications at Éditions Fides. Branching out from his university career as of 1970, he became a senior advisor to the Department of Communications in Ottawa. Retired, he lives in Montréal and devotes himself to writing scenarios for films and novels. He published L'ogre de barbarie in 1972, and ten years later L'enfant du cinquième Nord, (translated as The Children's Wing in 1996) for which he received le Grand Prix for French science fiction in 1983. This scientific fiction, as he calls it, had great success and was translated into several languages. In 1990, he published L'ultime alliance, a long novel that unfolds in the same places as Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, a sanatorium become research clinic on human intelligence. With Le bâillement du diable, in 1998, he returned to suspense, with the story of kidnappers interested in shooting films that expose human suffering to the point of death. In all his books, the author raises moral issues through his moving narratives. He took part in several cinematographic productions and wrote the scripts for Charles Binamé's highly regarded film Un Homme et son péché (2002), and Jean Beaudin's Nouvelle-France (2004).