marsha skrypuch BIO

Date and Place of Birth:  Dec. 12, 1954, Brantford, Ontario, Canada  
Mother: Dorothy Dennis, b. Jan. 20,1934, Brantford, ON, Canada
Father: Marshall (Myroslaw) Forchuk, b. May 17, 1929 Lake Eliza, Alberta, Canada

Marsha Skrypuch has a degree in English literature from Western University and a Master’s degree in Library Science. She is a highly successful  and multi-award winning author as well as an inventor. Her scrupulously researched historical fiction and narrative non-fiction focuses on refugees and war from a young person’s perspective. Since 1996 she has written over 25 books covering the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, the internment of Ukrainians in Canada in the First World War as well as the internment of another affected group, the Alevi Kurds. Seven of her novels cover the Second World War experience of Ukrainians. She has also written four books about post-war Vietnamese refugees. Her awards (voted by young readers) include the Ontario Silver Birch Award twice, the BC Red Cedar Award twice, the Saskatchewan Snow Willow Award, the Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award and the  inaugural Crystal Kite Award for the Americas, an award sponsored by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators and is a peer award. Marsha was also awarded the Order of Princess Olha, bestowed upon her by President Yuschenko. She is now working on a trilogy based on the current war in Ukraine and a historical novel about Roksolana, wife of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Turkish Sultan.

Marsha was one of the earliest members of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. One of their big projects was to erect monuments and plaques on the sites of the internment camps for Ukrainians across the country, twenty six in all. Marsha’s Ukrainian grandfather was one of the thousands of Ukrainians interned in these camps, an event that influenced Marsha’s writing profoundly and inspired her first book Silver Threads, as well as two subsequent: Prisoners in the Promised Land and Dance of the Banished.

Marsha’s father, Marshall Forchuk, was born in Lake Eliza, Alberta in 1922 and did not teach Marsha or her sister Cheryl the Ukrainian language because he felt badly discriminated against in the fully English-Canadian community. Marsha's mother, Dorothy, of Irish-Canadian descent, born in Brantford, Ontario encouraged Marsha to learn about her Ukrainian heritage. Dorothy was proud of her adopted Ukrainian heritage and was happy to accompany Marsha on her first trip to Ukraine in August 2001. Marsha visited Ukraine a second time in August 2008 and had the opportunity to visit her grandfather’s village, Hitler’s bunker in Vinnytsia, Roksolana’s birthplace in Rohatyn and traveled extensively in Crimea and along the coast, visiting many places including Feodosia, Simferopol, Balaklava, Yalta, Bakhchysarai and Sevastopol.

Marsha  married Orest Skrypuch in the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Brantford in 1981 where her in-laws were very active members of the Ukrainian community.  Marsha’s in-laws, traumatized by their war experiences in Soviet and Nazi-occupied WWII Ukraine were reluctant to visit their homeland, but Marsha’s 2001 trip paved the way for them to finally visit Ukraine in 2002.  Orest Skrypuch is a retired ophthalmologist and a recreational pilot who often flies Marsha to places in North America for her research or book events.

Marsha Skrypuch
#bannedbyrussia
www.calla.com

INTERVIEW EXCERPT

Date and place of interview: March 28, 2023 on Zoom
Length of interview: 1 hour 38 minutes
Interviewer: Ariadna Ochrymovych
Language: English

Interviewer: So do you consider yourself to be Ukrainian Canadian, Canadian Ukrainian, Canadian or how do you present yourself?

Marsha:  If people ask, Ukrainian Canadian or Canadian Ukrainian is the way that I usually say.   In the states I think that they call me Ukrainian Canadian. I'm not sure (about) the publishers but, I mean, I was born in Canada. It's just that I really do identify with being Ukrainian, it's the filter of my life, even though I don't speak Ukrainian.

Interviewer: What about your sister, how does she identify?

Marsha:  My sister would identify as Canadian Ukrainian. My sister is a professor of Psychiatric Nursing at Western University.

She's very accomplished, she has also traveled to Ukraine.  She is more, like history isn't her thing, and she fully supports everything that I I do and also Ukraine, in terms of being Ukrainian but she's not as immersed in the history or anything like that as I am. She’s a scholar of homelessness and so she's usually the the person that's interviewed about homelessness in Canada because this has been a big focus of hers.

We’re doing the same thing because I do write about displaced people and refugees and basically that's what she’s doing too. It's just a different focus and we talk about this a lot, how we do almost the same  thing but just from a different perspective. What happened to our own grandfather being interned had a profound intergenerational impact on us and after he escaped the internment camp his own community turned their back on him and I'm sure that you're aware that that happened to the internists. The church had turned their backs on those men because the communities thought that they must have deserved to be arrested and so that whole experience of being shunned has had a profound effect on me and the work that I do and also on my sister.

But he ended up escaping, he ended up at a coal mine in Lethbridge and changed his name so our family name was something like this and he changed it to Forchuk, and instead of Yuri Fesiuk he became George Forchuk.

Interviewer: So that book The Internment Diary, is that about his experience?

Marsha:  He's a character in this book, this is actually told from the perspective of a girl who's interned at Spirit Lake in Quebec.

Interviewer: I was just wondering about your presentations in schools and so is it mostly high school?

Marsha:  Middle grade which is grade five to eight usually, I do do high school but middle grade is the sweet spot.

“Making Bombs for Hitler” is basically a viral of popularity and it's about a girl, a Ukrainian girl who was captured by the Nazis and forced to be an Ostarbeiter*. There’s no other novel written about Ostarbiters, there are the rare personal memoirs but there's no other novel that affected millions … that’s a tragedy that there's no other book. But the thing is that book Making Bombs for Hitler came out in 2012. It's my perennial bestseller and so kids know me for that book and in the U.S that book is being used as a companion novel to The Diary of Anne Frank during Holocaust remembrance month. And I'm really grateful for that because what Ukrainians went through in World War II needs to be remembered as well. Important to remember but to have a really good context about what Hitler was up to. This is what I do and so having that audience means that the librarians are reading it, parents are reading it, teachers are reading it but kids are reading it and what I’ve heard from teachers, they love my book so much because they read like thrillers…they put symbols on the front of them to let their classmates know that this is a really good book to read. So they don't even know what Ukrainian is, they just immerse themselves in this history because they find it so compelling.

* People taken to Germany as slave labour during WWII