Michèle Ouimet, a former war reporter at La Presse, will be on the Rivier University Campus on Thursday April 11 at 7:00 pm in the Demoulas Room on the second floor of the Benoit Education Building.

Her presence on campus is sponsored by the Club Richelieu of Nashua, and the Quebec Government Office in Boston.

Title: Woman at War, From Reality to Fiction

I’ve worked at La Presse, a francophone daily newspaper based in Montreal, for 29 years. As a journalist, I have reported on numerous stories in dangerous countries across Asia and the Middle East like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Egypt. During my conference, I will talk about my experience abroad and how it influenced the writing of my novels.

Michèle Ouimet was a journalist at La Presse for 29 years, from 1989 to 2018. She conducted reports about several topics around the world. She covered wars, dangerous zones, and disasters. Some examples of the subjects covered by Madame Ouimet are: Algeria, Rwanda, Iran, Afghanistan, the earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami in Japan, the famine in both Zambia and Malawi, refugee camps in Pakistan, Africa, Chad, and Lebanon, Egypt’s political revolution, and the Syrian war.

She is the recipient of several journalism awards, for instance six times at the Canadian Journalism competition, twice at the Judith-Jasmin competition which recognizes the best reports in Québec, and in 2008 she won the Michener award for her report on the Taliban prisons in Afghanistan; the Michener award is named after the former Governor General of Canada.

Madame Ouimet has written 2 novels; La Promesse (The Promise) which was published in 2014, and L’heure Mauve (The Purple Hour) in 2017, as well as a story titled Histoire d’une vie trop courte (History of a life too short) which was published in 2015. She is currently writing a second story which is about her various reports around the world.