About Yves Laliberté

Yves Laliberté is the author of the Quebec bestsellers in the LE SECRET DE DIEU series, namely Le message des templiers and Le trésor enfoui. He continues the popular series with volumes III and IV, Les enfants sacrifiés and Le vortex de feu, released in bookshops in 2024. He is currently completing the revision of the manuscript for Volume V, entitled La bombe de Pythagore (Pythagoras's Bomb ), which, for the first time, will be published in its entirety in the same volume.

He took his first steps into the Quebec market with action thrillers Tutti Footsie and Le Cyclope, published by Direct Livre in the early 2000s. By his early teens, he was already enjoying writing and home-binding short novels in the same literary genre. This pleasure was increased tenfold by the collaboration of a childhood friend, Marc Chartrand, who illustrated his comics and novels.  

This passion didn't stop him from enthusiastically taking part in team sports in organized leagues: field hockey, broomball (this was 1970) and fastball, where he was among the best hitters with a batting average in the high .333s. He was also involved for years in a local community youth group called the 3-J (jeune pour jeunes par jeunes), which provided recreational activities for local children, including a sponsored pee-wee ball team, dances with the most popular rock bands of the day, town-wide winter carnivals, amateur nights and comedy plays, not to mention a weekly column in Le Bulletin de Buckingham magazine.  

Yves Laliberté must have been predestined, because his favorite toy in early school days was a big Underwood typewriter. It had the sturdiness to cope with his vigorous typing from morning to night, after Yves had abandoned the piano in favor of another keyboard and other kinds of notes.

He soon realized that he wanted to base his life on books, and went on to study French literature at the University of Ottawa. There, he wrote his doctoral thesis on Les Îles de la nuit, the most famous collection of poems by Quebec author Alain Grandbois (1900-1975). Recipient of various scholarships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Quebec government and the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Arts, he published in literary journals before signing scholarly studies, Alain Grandbois, prosateur et poète (David, 1997) and Les rituels de l'absolu ̸ Essai sur la poésie d'Alain Grandbois (David, 2001). Critics saw the latter study as a brilliant work renewing knowledge of Grandbois's poetry, making Yves Laliberté the expert in the field. Here's what a well-known academic, Réjean Robidoux, had to say about it:

A masterly essay, magnificently written. Its quality establishes the poet's universal greatness on an irrefragable basis. But the exegete's flair for intelligence (intus legere) is matched by almost immeasurable erudition.

From the age of twenty-one, Yves Laliberté went on to teach courses in Quebec literature at the University of Ottawa, where his favorite authors were Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hébert.

Yves was born in Masson (now the eastern quarter of the amalgamated city of Gatineau), a small village founded at the time around a paper mill - no coincidence, since he never lacked the material medium, newsprint, for his cartoons and writings.