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In Defiance
On February 7, 2012, as students in Quebec prepared to vote to go on strike, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois gave a rousing speech: “What you do today will be remembered. The decision you make will tell future generations who we were. And you already know what is being said today about our generation. That we are the generation of comfort and indifference, the generation of cash and iPods; that we are individualists, egotists; that we don’t care about anything, except our navels and our gadgets. Aren’t you tired of hearing this? Well, I am. Luckily, today we have a chance to prove that it’s not true, that it has never been true.”
The “Maple Spring” saw more than 300,000 students across Quebec protest a tuition fee hike by striking from their classes. Nadeau-Dubois takes readers step-by-step through the strike, recounting the confrontations with journalists, ministers, judges, and police. Along the way he exposes the moral and intellectual poverty of the Quebec elite and celebrates the remarkable energy of the students who opposed the mercenary attitude of the austerity agenda.
In Defiance is translated from the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award winner for non-fiction, Tenir tête (Lux Éditeur) We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of theRoadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.
Contributors
Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois
Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois was the lead spokesperson for CLASSE, one of the more vocal student bodies that participated in the 2012 student strikes that swept Quebec. He is a regular panelist on Radio-Canada.
Lazer Lederhendler
Lazer Lederhendler is a full-time freelance translator specializing in contemporary Québécois fiction and nonfiction. His work has earned him literary distinctions in Canada and abroad, including multiple nominations for the Governor General’s Literary Award, which he won in 2008 for the translation of Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner. Lederhendler is also a three-time winner of the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation awarded by the Quebec Writers’ Federation. His translation of the novel Malabourg by Perrine Leblanc is forthcoming from the House of Anansi later this year. Lazer Lederhendler lives in Montreal.
