Born in 1942, Michel Tremblay grew up in a Montreal apartment where several families lived side by side. His humble origins would later influence his works, often set in the heart of the working class, where social and moral hardships intertwined. He is the author of a considerable number of plays, novels, and adaptations of works by foreign authors and playwrights, and also wrote several musicals, screenplays, and an opera. His worlds are populated by women, sometimes temperamental and imperfect, sometimes fragile and endearing, whom he portrays with realism and humor. Living through the hardships of daily life, his characters, with their colorful dialect, also contributed to introducing into the dramaturgy and literature of the time a level of language largely ignored by artists: joual.
His works The Belles-sœurs cycle, the Chronicles of Plateau-Mont-Royal, and The Desrosiers Diaspora belong to the corpus of major works of contemporary French-language literature. His body of work has earned him the Athanase-David Prize, the Jacques-Cartier Prize, the Silver Medal of the Mouvement national des Québécoises et Québécois, the Molson Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Prince Pierre of Monaco Prize (finalist), a diploma from the Académie du Languedoc, the Odyssée Prize, and the Blue Metropolis International Literary Prize. His book Un ange cornu avec des ailes de toles was single-handedly awarded, between 1994 and 1995, the Prix du grand public La Presse – Salon du livre de Montréal, the Prix du Signet d’or, the Prix Louis-Hémon (Académie du Languedoc), the Prix des lectrices de Elle Québec and the Prix des libraires.