I am a writer and literary historian originally from the Gulf Islands and now based in Vancouver, Canada.

My new book, The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance (ed. Susan Renouf), was released by ECW Press in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. in the fall. (Publishers Weekly, BC Review, interview with Deborah Kalb).

The story reimagines the WW II forced labour years of my grandmother, Irina Kylynych, who at 19 was caught up in a Nazi raid of her Ukrainian village and deported to the Leica Camera factory in Wetzlar, Germany. Irina was eventually pulled from the labour camp to work as a domestic in the owners’ mansion by Leica heiress, Elsie Kühn-Leitz, who was herself arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo on charges of “excessive humanity.” The book traces both women’s stories through research, intergenerational kitchen memoir, and dramatized historical flashbacks. A German translation is forthcoming from Verlag Urachhaus is spring, 2025.

Past work includes a collection of 3 biographical dramas about 20th century poets H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Mina Loy, and Nancy Cunard (Staging Modernist Lives, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017). I have performed my 25-character one woman H.D. play, The Tree, in North America, Europe, and Asia. My first book, based in my doctoral work at the University of Sussex (UK), traced the effect of 19th and 20th century archaeology on English and French literature and thought (Stratified Modernism, Peter Lang, 2009). The through line? Let’s just say I have a sustained interest in the persistence of the past and the dramatic resurgence of forgotten stories.

I am also Associate Professor and director of Simon Fraser University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, a hybrid M.A. for small, eclectic cohorts of working-aged adults. I teach writing, literary modernism (1880-1950), and graduate-level field schools in Oxford (biography) and Rome (Italian food history).

The pages on this site include descriptions and samples of past and current work. You can reach me at scolby@sfu.ca.