Joël Champetier (1957-2015)

French-Canadian SF writer and editor Joël Champetier, 57, died May 30, 2015 after a long struggle with leukemia. Champetier was a renowned and award-winning SF author, and longtime editor of Solaris, one of the most prestigious French-language SF magazines in the world.

Champetier was born in 1957 in La Corne, Quebec. He worked in electrochemistry before becoming a full-time writer in 1981, and lived in Montréal, Ville-Marie, and Gallix before settling 20 years ago in the village of Saint-Séverin de Prouville. His first published story was “Le chemin des fleurs” in 1981, in Solaris, and his debut novel was YA La mer au fond du monde (1990). First adult novel, La Taupe et le Dragon (1991), was translated as The Dragon’s Eye and published by Tor in 1999.  He worked on the screenplay for La Peau blanche, based on his own work, which was released in 2004 (distributed in English as Cannibal and White Skin). He was also a respected literary critic, and was guest of honor at the 2007 World Fantasy Convention.

Champetier helped found the Boréal Congress, an annual SF conference in Quebec. He began working on Solaris in 1990 and took over as editor in 1999.