Rosemary Sullivan Books In Order

Publication Order of Picture Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Rosemary Sullivan is a Canadian anthologist, biographer, and poet. She is also a professor emerita at University of Toronto.

Born 1947 in the small town of Valois on Lac Saint-Louis, which is located just outside of Montreal, Quebec. She graduated from St. Thomas High School land then went on to attend McGill University on a scholarship. She would receive her bachelor’s degree in 1968. She received her MA in 1969 from the University of Connecticut.

From there on Rosemary Sullivan attended the University of Sussex, where she received a Ph.D. for her thesis The Garden Master: The Poetry of Theodore Roethke in 1972. Her work would be published as a book in 1975.

Once she had completed her Ph.D., Sullivan decided to move to France so that she could teach at the University of Dijon. She would then teach at the University of Bordeaux. It was not two years later that she was hired at the University of Victoria. She would then be hired again in 1977 at the University of Toronto, a place that she taught until she retired.

In 1978, Sullivan decided that it was a good idea to dedicate herself to her writing while she was still teaching. She eventually became a professor emerita. Her first collection of poems was titled The Space a Name Makes and was awarded the Gerald Lampert Award for being the best first book of poetry published in Canada in 1968.

Sullivan would switch genres and in 1987 began writing her own biography of Elizabeth Smart titled By Heart. It was published in 1991 by Penguin Books. The book would end up being nominated for a Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. It was through writing the book that Sullivan realized that she had a passion for biography.

She would write another biography that came out in 1995 that was titled Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen. The book would go on to win a variety of awards, including the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Non-Fiction, the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, the University of British Columbia’s President’s Medal for Biography, and the City of Toronto Book Award.

Another one of her biographies, The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, was published in 1998. It would be reprinted in 2020. In 1991, she released A Labyrinth of Desire, which was a meditation on women and romantic obsession. In 2006, her book Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille, won the Canadian Jewish Books Yad Vashem Award in Holocaust History.

Her biography from 2015 titled Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Aliluyeva was well-received to the extent that it received multiple awards. This included the American Plutarch BIO Award, the RBC Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the BC National Non-Fiction Prize, and ended up being a finalist for the American Pen Award for Biography and the National Books Critics Circle Award.

Her book The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation was released in 2022. Sullivan was enlisted to write the book thanks to a research team that was investigating the betrayal of Anne Frank, detailing the investigation and coming to the conclusion that the most likely suspect was Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish notary. That conclusion ended up being challenged by experts. The book was taken out of circulation in the Netherlands but continues to be available in all other parts of the world.

Besides her writing career, the author has done other work, including work with Amnesty International. In 1980 she founded an international congress that was called The Writer and Human Rights in Aid of Amnesty, which was attended by seventy writers from a total of thirty countries. The papers were published in Canada by Doubleday and then in the United States in 1983.

Rosemary Sullivan has traveled all over the world, including to countries such as Cuba, Chile, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Nicaragua. In 2012 Sullivan was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. She also received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.

Four years previous, she had received the Lorne Pierce Medal for major contribution to Canadian Literature, from the Royal Society of Canada. In 2015, Sullivan was the grateful recipient of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction for Stalin’s Daughter.

Sullivan has also held other positions of acclaim. She has been a Trudeau Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Jackman Humanities Fellow, and a Killam Fellow. She also served from 2001 to 2011 as the Canada Research Chair in Literature at the University of Toronto.

Labyrinth of Desire is an early book from Rosemary Sullivan.

It’s the type of book that women talk to their girlfriends about and is a book that they would like their lovers to read. It’s an intellectually sexy experience that explores with provocation and wit the women’s history of romantic obsession through the telling and deconstruction of a passionate love affair.

If you have an opening in your reading schedule for a new and interesting book, check this one out!

Memory Making: Selected Essays is a collection of essays by Rosemary Sullivan. In Canada, the award-winning author is the preeminent literary biographer in Canada.

She has written about such people as Elizabeth Smart, Margaret Atwood, Theodore Roethke and Gwendolyn MacEwan. In addition to the books that she has penned, she has also written hundreds of essays, memoirs, and travel pieces.

This collection is able to bring together the best of these essays and put them together into one easily-read package. In a total of seventeen essays, Rosemary Sullivan is able to focus on Atwood’s childhood, where she meets the eccentric Elizabeth Smart and hooks up with the Canadian poet Al Purdy.

The author also writes about the life of a literary biographer and what it takes to put together an anthology. All throughout, the reader gets to witness Rosemary Sullivan’s own personal stamp and personality. The work is lyrical at times while other times the author plays the scholar for a work that is lively and illuminating and one you can’t miss!