Georges Bugnet is one of the major French writers of Western Canada. During a life which spanned 101 years he published four novels in addition to short stories, essays and poems. He was born in France in 1879 at Chalon-sur-Saône, Burgandy, and was educated at the Université du Dijon and the Sorbonne. In 1904, at the age of 25, he came to Canada with his young wife, Julia. In 1905 after working in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, where their first son, Charles, was born they moved to St. Albert, Alberta. In March 1906 they took up their homestead near Lac Majeau, 80 km northwest of Edmonton, in an area later named Rich Valley. Bugnet is best known for his novel, La Forêt (935) trans. The Forest (1976). This is one of the earliest examples of realism in Canadian literature and reflects Bugnet’s fascination with living in the forest and its affects on human behaviour. When he published his first two novels, Les Lys de sang (1922) and Nipsya (1924) he used the pen-name, Henri Doutremont.
