Janice Kulyk Keefer was born in Toronto, Canada, 1952. Her mother Natalia Solowska emigrated from Halychyna, 1936; her father was born in Canada shortly after his parents emigrated from Halychyna, 1914. Educated at the University of Toronto, Kulyk Keefer won a Commonwealth Scholarship to obtain a D. Phil from Sussex University, England, 1983. Ever since, Kulyk Keefer has been published in Canada’s leading magazines and anthologies, as well as in the United States, Germany, England, Mexico, France, the Netherlands, and Ukraine. She has published three novels, three collections of short stories, as well as a volume of poetry and two critical studies, one on Mavis Gallant and one on the fiction of Maritime Canada. Among the awards she has won are two first prizes in two consecutive years, in the CBC Radio Literary Competition. She has twice been nominated for Canada’s most prestigious literary prize, the Governor General’s Award. Professor of English Literature at the University of Guelph, Ontario, her most recent publications include Honey and Ashes (Harper & Collins, 1998), a narrative of her maternal family’s immigration to Canada, and Marrying the Sea, which was awarded the Canadian Author’s Award for the best book of poetry published in Canada, 1998, the same year she co-edited Two Lands: New Visions, an anthology of contemporary fiction from Canada and Ukraine. In this view, Janice Kulyk Keefer is reading at the 1998 Eden Mills Writer’s festival held annually near Guelph. [Photo, courtesy Llewellyn Clarke] |