As a poet and writer, [Rosemary Sullivan] knows that life is lived not as theory but as practice, that we exist on earth not as ideas but as living creatures, and that you can understand nothing about a place without listening to individual people and their stories. She has concerned herself with intense particulars.

— Margaret Atwood

A Montrealer by birth, Rosemary Sullivan received her B.A. from McGill University, her M.A. from the University of Connecticut, and her PhD from the University of Sussex. She is the author of sixteen books, including her most recent Where the World Was: A Memoir (2023). The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation (2022) was published in twenty-two countries and won the  Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence as well as the Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 on Poland’s Major Book Review Site (granice.pl).
Her biography Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva won the 2015 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction; the 2016 RBC Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction; the 2016 BC National Non-Fiction Award; the Biographers International Organization’s 2016 Plutarch Prize; and was a finalist for the American PEN/Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the National Books Critics Circle Award in 2016. Stalin’s Daughter has sold in twenty-two countries. Sullivan’s book Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille (2006), was published by HarperCollins in Canada and the US, John Murray in England, as well as in Spain, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Italy and The Netherlands. It won the Canadian Jewish Book Awards Yad Vashem Prize in Holocaust History/ Scholarship. Her other books include Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession (2001) published in Canada, the U.S., England, Spain, and Latin America; Cuba: Grace Under Pressure with photographs by Malcolm David Batty (2003); and the national best seller The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out (1998). Her 1995 biography Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Non-Fiction, the University of British Columbia’s Medal for Canadian Biography, the City of Toronto Book Award and was nominated for the Trillium prize. It became the basis for Brenda Longfellow’s award-winning documentary Shadow Maker (1998).  Sullivan’s first biography, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart/A Life (1991) was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction.  Her first poetry collection The Space a Name Makes (1986) won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She has since published two other books of poetry with Black Moss Press: Blue Panic (1991) and The Bone Ladder: New and Selected Poems (2001). In 2001, Black Moss released Memory-Making: The Selected Essays of Rosemary Sullivan that included essays published in Canadian and International magazines. Her children’s book Molito, written with Juan Opitz and illustrated by Colleen Sullivan was published in 2011, with a CD of music and narrative in the sleeve of the book. Her journalistic pieces have won her a National Magazine Awards silver medal and a Western Journalism Awards first prize for travelogue. Sullivan is also the editor of eight anthologies, including, Stories by Canadian Womem, and Short Fiction for Oxford University Press. She was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal (2008) by the Royal Society of Canada. She has lectured across Canada and in the US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden. Belgium, Spain, India, Puerto Rico, Chile, and Mexico. She was the recipient of Guggenheim, Killam, Camargo, Jackman Humanities Institute, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation fellowships. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto where she held a Canada Research Chair in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction and was the founding director of the MA Program in English in the Field of Creative Writing.  She was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in Ontario in 2012, and that same year was inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada (Canada’s highest civilian award) for outstanding contributions to Canadian Literature and Culture.