Nicolas Billon Information

Nicolas Billon's work has been produced in Toronto, Stratford, New York, and Paris. His triptych Fault Lines garnered the 2013 Governor-General's Award for Drama. He adapted his first play, The Elephant Song, into a feature film starring Bruce Greenwood, Xavier Dolan, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Catherine Keener. Nicolas plays softball, hockey, and Settlers of Catan with equal fervour. Nicolas Billon grew up in Ottawa, Paris, and Montreal. His vocation as a writer first surfaced at the age of six, when he wrote stories on index cards, stapled them together, and sold them to his mother for a tidy profit. Four years later, he made his stage debut as the three of hearts in a junior school production of Alice in Wonderland. Nicolas began writing short stories when he was twelve. His first "publication" came when one of the school librarians photocopied two of his stories and added them to the library collection. He now had his own entry in the card catalogue, a gesture that he's never forgotten. Throughout his teens, Nicolas produced a number of short stories (20% = pretty good) and poems (98% = appalling), and continued acting in school plays. He also developed an interest in computing, and taught himself to program HyperCard stacks. In 1995, he created an interactive periodic table of the elements, HyperElements, with his friend Anthony Brichieri-Colombi. Voted one of MacUser's Top 30 Shareware Programs of 1996, it was used in a number of universities around the world. Between 1997 and 2000, Nicolas attended university, worked in Montreal's booming multimedia industry, and co-founded a community theatre company where he tried his hand at directing. Though all three activities were instructive, Nicolas concluded that none of them were for him, and he returned to writing. His first play, The Elephant Song, began as an exercise for a university class. At the urging of his teacher and classmates, Nicolas re-worked it into a one-act play with the intention of producing it himself. Following a public reading in Montreal, ...