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 2023. It won the Gold Medal for Europe Non-Fiction in the Independent Publishing Book Awards and was shortlisted for Taste Canada’s Culinary Narrative Award. A German translation is forthcoming from Verlag Urachhaus.

Through research, intergenerational kitchen memoir, and historical flashback, the story traces the WW II years of my grandmother, Irina Kylynych, who at 19 was captured 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.”

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 play, The Tree, about H.D., Ezra Pound and their circle, 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 resurgence of forgotten stories.

I am also Associate Professor and director of Simon Fraser University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, a part-time, live-Zoom and 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.