Julija Šukys

Julija Šukys draws on archives, interviews, bibliographical research, and observation to write about minor lives in war-torn or marginal places, about women's life-writing, and about the legacy of violence across generations and national borders. She is the author of three books, one book-length translation, and of many essays and articles.

Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), uses literary criticism, invention, and imagination to tell the story of the Algerian poet and novelist gunned down in a 1993 attack attributed to an Islamist armed group. An outspoken critic of the extremism roiling his country, Tahar Djaout, in death, became a powerful symbol for the murder of Algerian culture, as scores of journalists, writers and scholars were targeted in a swelling wave of violence. Miriam Cooke called Silence is Death "a beautiful but unsentimental book about [the] search for Algerian poet Tahar Djaout, who was killed in 1993 at the height of Islamic terrorism against intellectuals. No work of dreary lit crit, this is creative nonfiction at its best" (Choice).

Through Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (University of Nebraska, 2012), Šukys followed the letters and journals – the "life-writing" – of Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970), a Lithuanian librarian who slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its prisoners. Šimaitė placed Jewish children in orphanages and hid adults in the university library and in her apartment. She delivered letters and messages between the Vilna and Kovno Ghettos, hid diaries and manuscripts in her apartment, and delivered food, money, and medicine to the ghetto resistance. In 1944 she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau. After surviving her arrest and deportation, Šimaitė spent most of the rest of her life in Paris, where she kept diaries and maintained a vast international correspondence.

Over a decade of research, Šukys followed the path of Šimaitė's papers across the globe in an archival hunt that took her to Jerusalem, New York City, Vilnius, Stanford's Hoover Institution, and Kent State University in Ohio. The search yielded a collection of thousands of letters spanning the years 1932 and 1970, twenty-eight post-war diaries, and a handful of articles. These were the primary source for her book. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly called Epistolophilia "a powerful testament to the confluence of history and individual lives and passions." The book won a 2013 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Literature, a shortlist nomination for the Quebec Writers' Association's 2013 Mavis Gallant Prize and a longlist nomination for the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize in Literary Nonfiction (later called the RBC Taylor Prize). In 2016, Epistolophilia appeared in Lithuanian translation with the Lithuanian Writers' Union Press.

Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter's Reckoning (University of Nebraska, 2017) asks who pays for crimes committed long in the past and how. The book tells the story of Šukys's paternal grandparents, their 25-year forced separation, and subsequent reunion. It tracks what happens when one member of a tight-knit community begins to scratch at the surface of a received narrative, and considers questions of inheritance and what gets transferred across generations. The book asks: What stock do we put in bloodlines today? Do we bear responsibility for the actions of those who came before us? How do forgiveness and grace operate across generations and across the line that divides life and death? Siberian Exile won both the 2018 AABS Book Prize, awarded biennially by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, and the 2018 Vine Award in Nonfiction.

In addition to book writing, over the past two decades, Šukys has immersed herself in the tradition of the essay: personal, humoristic, lyric, reflective, and satirical. The themes of her published essays include a consideration of life with a degenerate disease; the conundrum of being a writer and a mother; the connection between white supremacy and 80s youth culture in Canada; and the Holocaust and Soviet history.

Finally, the author interview series called "CNF Conversations" that originated on Šukys's blog (julijasukys.com) has now found a permanent home at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies under the title "The Interview Project." The series is dedicated to shining a light on underread and underrepresented writers and forms of creative nonfiction. Scores of other writers have now joined Šukys in the endeavor as both interviewers and subjects.

Šukys has held grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Quebec Arts Council, the Banff Centre for the Creativity, Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In Fall 2022, she holds the Fulbright Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto.