made into a movie by Karim Hussain in 1976. Hussain won the Director's Award at the Boston Underground Film Festival for his work. Some of Blais' other works that were made into movies included Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (Claude Weisz, 1973), which won the Prix de la Quinzaine des jeunes réalisateurs at the Cannes Film Festival, Le sourd dans la ville (Mireille Dansereau, 1987), which won an award at the Venice Film Festival, and L'océan (Jean Feuchère, 1971). Blais won the Governor General's Prize in Canada for two of her novels, The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange (1968) and Deaf to the City (1979). She also wrote a 10-volume series starting with Soifs (1995) () translated into English as These Festive Islands. The series was set in an island town modeled on Key West and featured an interlocked cast of over a hundred characters including drag queens, painters, writers, and barflies, many of them based on acquaintances that she had made on the island where she had been a part of a community that included a journalist and novelist John Hersey and poet James Merrill. The writing was based on long sentences described as 'meandering' with a combination rapidly shifting between characters' internal monologues and dialogues. The books were written in a 'stream-of-consciousness' style, with no chapters and no paragraph breaks. The last book in the 10-volume series Une réunion près de la mer was published in 2018. She sponsored the starting in 2005; awarded annually to a French author for their debut novel. Blais enjoyed an ardent readership in French language literature and had won four Governor General's Literary Awards through her career. Writing in an article in Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, literary critic Jade Colbert called her "the 21st century Virginia Woolf" while Quebec novelist Michel Tremblay called her "one of our greatest national treasures". In addition to her novels, Blais has written several plays, collections of poetry and fiction, newspaper articles, radio dramas, and scripts for television. Her works had characters that included delinquent children, wayward nuns and abusive priests and included issues like white supremacy, nuclear holocaust, and the AIDS epidemic. Her books included suffering as recurring themes, though she herself had noted in an interview that she preferred serenity to suffering. Personal life Blais was a longtime partner of American writer and painter Mary Meigs. Meigs predeceased her in 2002. Blais died