A French studies professor at Trent University in Peterborough has won a 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award for the translation of a work of speculative fiction by American-born Canadian author and literary critic Larissa Lai.
Along with partner and long-time collaborator Suzanne Grenier, Peterborough’s Sylvie Bérard won the award for Les Soeurs de la Muée, the duo’s French translation of Lai’s 2018 novel The Tiger Flu.
“I feel like I am floating on a cloud,” says Bérard in a media release issued by Trent University. “To be seen and heard by peers at this level is profoundly affirming. It also gives this wonderful book and its ideas a new life and visibility in French. The universe created by Larissa Lai in The Tiger Flu is quite unique, so this is the kind of translation that really benefits from teamwork.”
The winners of the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Awards were announced on November 6, with the winning books chosen by the same 14 peer assessment committees that were convened to select the 35 English-language and 35 French-language finalists announced in October.
“In this captivating translation, Sylvie Bérard and Suzanne Grenier met the colossal challenge of recreating Larissa Lai’s biopunk thriller with their attention to detail and toe-curling inventiveness,” stated peer assessment committee members Arianne Des Rochers, Émilie Laramée, and Paul Ruban.
“By mixing pop culture references with imaginary elements, the translators offer up a living mosaic, a unique window into a dystopian world shot through with possibility. This work is a bold and remarkable exercise in adaptation and transcreation.”
Lai’s novel The Tiger Flu, her first in 16 years when it was published, tells the story of a community of parthenogenetic women 120 years in the future who, after being sent into exile by the patriarchal and corporate Salt Water City, go to war against disease, technology, and an economic system that threatens them with extinction. The novel won a 2019 winner of the Lambda Literary Awards, which celebrate the best in LGBTQ+ literature.
Bérard and Grenier’s translation, which was published by Montréal francophone publishing house Le Quartanier, required two years of both scholarly research and artistic creation, including the creation of new terms (such as the noun “muée” in the translation’s title) and cultural references that feel authentic to French readers while remaining faithful to the English original.
“When you translate science fiction, you don’t just translate the words — you translate the history of ideas, the imagined future, and the nuance of worlds that another writer has created,” Bérard says.
“Translation is about recreating an entire universe so that readers in another language can inhabit it naturally,” Bérard adds. “We don’t want people to feel like they are reading a translation. We want people to feel like they are reading a great book, and that requires a love for the work that you’re translating and needing to immerse yourself in the author’s original work.”
The translation was Bérard and Grenier eighth translated work together, and the second time they had been nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award for translating one of Lai’s novels. In 2022, they were nominated for Le fruit de la puanteur, their translation of Salt Fish Girl, Lai’s 2002 prequel to The Tiger Flu.
Bérard, who is an accomplished science fiction writer as well as a scholar, is also the recipient of a Trillium Book Award for Poetry in 2018 and a Trillium Book Award nomination in 2021.
