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Rosemary Sullivan | |
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 Rosemary Sullivan | |
| Born | 1947 (age 76–77) Valois, Quebec, Canada |
| Occupation | Writer |
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| rosemarysullivan | |
Rosemary Sullivan OC (born 1947) is a Canadian poet, biographer, and anthologist. She is also a professor emerita at University of Toronto. [1]
Sullivan was born in the small town of Valois on Lac Saint-Louis, just outside Montreal, Quebec. After graduating from St. Thomas High School, she attended McGill University on a scholarship, and received her bachelor's degree in 1968. Sullivan received her MA in 1969 from the University of Connecticut and then attended the University of Sussex, receiving a Ph.D. for her thesis The Garden Master: The Poetry of Theodore Roethke in 1972 (which was published as a book in 1975).
After she completed her Ph.D., Sullivan moved to France to teach at the University of Dijon, and then at the University of Bordeaux. Two years later she was hired at the University of Victoria, and then in 1977 at the University of Toronto, where she taught until her retirement. In 1978, she decided to dedicate herself to her writing, while still teaching. She is now a Professor Emerita.
Sullivan's first collection of poems, The Space a Name Makes, was awarded the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada in 1968. [2] In 1987, Sullivan began writing a biography of Elizabeth Smart, By Heart, which was published in 1991 by Penguin Books. It was nominated for a Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction. Sullivan realized that she had a passion for biography. Her Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen, which was published in 1995, won numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction, the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Non-Fiction, the University of British Columbia's President's Medal for Biography, and the City of Toronto Book Award. Another of her biographies, The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, was published in 1998, and reprinted in 2020. In 1991, she published Labyrinth of Desire, a meditation on women and romantic obsession, and in 2006, Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille, which won the Canadian Jewish Books Yad Vashem Award in Holocaust History. Her 2015 biography Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva won the American Plutarch BIO award; The RBC Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction; the BC National Non-Fiction Prize; the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize; and was a finalist for the American Pen Award for Biography and the National Books Critics Circle Award.
In 2022, Harper Collins released The Betrayal of Anne Frank: a Cold Case Investigation. Sullivan was enlisted to write the book by a research team investigating the betrayal of Anne Frank, detailing the investigation and their conclusion that Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh was the most likely suspect. That conclusion was challenged by experts. The book was taken out of circulation in the Netherlands but remains available everywhere else. [3]
Aside from her writing career, Sullivan has worked with Amnesty International; in 1980 she founded an International congress called The Writer and Human Rights in Aid of Amnesty, attended by 70 writers from thirty countries. [4] The papers were published by Doubleday in Canada and the U.S. in 1983. She has traveled all over the world, including Russia, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua. [4]
Sullivan was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2012 [5] and received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal that same year. In 2008, she received the Lorne Pierce Medal for Major Contribution to Canadian Literature, the Royal Society of Canada. In 2015, she won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction for Stalin's Daughter, her biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva. [6] She has been a Trudeau Fellow; a Guggenheim Fellow; a Jackman Humanities Fellow; and a Killam Fellow and was Canada Research Chair in Literature at the University of Toronto from 2001 to 2011.
Carol Ann Shields, was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.
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Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva was the second wife of Joseph Stalin. She was born in Baku to a friend of Stalin, a fellow revolutionary, and was raised in Saint Petersburg. Having known Stalin from a young age, she married him when she was 17, and they had two children. Alliluyeva worked as a secretary for Bolshevik leaders, including Vladimir Lenin and Stalin, before enrolling at the Industrial Academy in Moscow to study synthetic fibres and become an engineer. She had health issues, which had an adverse impact on her relationship with Stalin. She also suspected he was unfaithful, which led to frequent arguments with him. On several occasions, Alliluyeva reportedly contemplated leaving Stalin, and after an argument, she fatally shot herself early in the morning of 9 November 1932.
Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva. In 1967, she became an international sensation when she defected to the United States and, in 1978, became a naturalized citizen. From 1984 to 1986, she briefly returned to the Soviet Union and had her Soviet citizenship reinstated. She was Stalin's last surviving child.
Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces, which was adapted for the screen in 2007.
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Gwendolyn Margaret MacEwen was a Canadian poet and novelist. A "sophisticated, wide-ranging and thoughtful writer," she published more than 20 books in her life. "A sense of magic and mystery from her own interests in the Gnostics, Ancient Egypt and magic itself, and from her wonderment at life and death, makes her writing unique.... She's still regarded by most as one of the best Canadian poets."
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The RBC Taylor Prize (2000–2020), formerly known as the Charles Taylor Prize, was a Canadian literary award presented by the Charles Taylor Foundation to the best Canadian book of literary non-fiction. It is named for Charles P. B. Taylor, a noted Canadian historian and writer. The 2020 prize was the final year the prize was awarded. The prize was inaugurated in 2000, and was presented biennially until 2004. At the 2004 awards ceremony, it was announced that the Charles Taylor Prize would become an annual award. The award had a monetary value of $30,000.
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This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2016.
