Perhaps the highlight of the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival is the International Literary Grand Prix, awarded to a very deserving Joyce Carol Oates at the Bibliothèque Nationale last night. The prolific writer, who began her career at the tender age of 26, has penned some 70 works, which include novels, short stories, essays, memoirs, plays and children’s fiction. She has also written under the pen names of Lauren Kelly and Rosamond Smith. In spite of her many literary achievements and her prominent professorship at Princeton University, Oates came across as affable, calm and poised, with many fine words for Canada, where she taught in the 1970s and founded the Ontario Review with her late husband.