Winnipeg – The Shevchenko Foundation (TSF) is pleased to announce that The Matryoshka Memoirs by Sasha Colby, published by ECW Press, is the winner of the 2026 KOBZAR Book Award.
Sasha Colby was presented with the award at a gala presentation ceremony held at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg on March 26, 2026, for her work of creative nonfiction which explores the experiences of her grandmother, a forced laborer in Nazi Germany. Through research into her grandmother’s life, she discovers a parallel story of the woman who initially pulled her grandmother from servitude and was later imprisoned by the Gestapo. Colby weaves together the narratives of both women in a story of resilience and family, which demonstrates the unique and anomalous nature of the Ukrainian Canadian experience.
Also shortlisted for the 2026 prize were the non-fiction No Place Like Home: Enemy Alien Internment in Canada during the Great War by Bohdan S. Kordan (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and the graphic novel Red Harvest by Michael Cherkas (NBM Publishing).
This year’s jury included Kay Rollans (Managing Editor, Brush Education), Niigaan Sinclair (Author and Professor, University of Manitoba), and Myrna Kostash (author and winner of the 2024 KOBZAR Book Award). All three unique shortlisted titles selected by the jury highlight issues that impact Ukrainians as a people in Canada and recognize the complexities of the Ukrainian Canadian experience.
Here’s what the 2026 KOBZAR Book Award jury had to say about this year’s winner:
“The Matryoshka Memoirs is an innovative, educational read which beautifully collages the past with contemporary Ukrainian experiences. With sharp and beautiful writing and a non-linear structure, it is a gift of literary non-fiction. It successfully weaves two distinct stories over time in ways that leave a significant and life-affirming impact on its reader. Sasha Colby’s ability to paint trauma with tenderness, kindness, and sensitivity is of immense beauty.”
“The Shevchenko Foundation is delighted to present the KOBZAR Book Award to Sasha Colby. Sasha’s story represents that of many descendants of post WWII immigrants to Canada and offers another lens into a very specific period in history that has shaped the Ukrainian Canadian identity,” says Boris Balan, TSF President. “Many thanks to the authors for sharing their stories and the jurors who spent hours reading and deliberating on the wonderful titles that were submitted from across our country.”
Sasha Colby is the Director of Simon Fraser University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, a live-Zoom MA for working aged adults across Canada that includes travel study in Italy and at the University of Oxford. She is currently building an Oxford-partnered international research centre devoted to uniting research with better storytelling so that it travels further and with more impact.
Presented every other year, the $25,000 KOBZAR Book Award recognizes outstanding contributions to Canadian literary arts by authors who write on a topic with a tangible connection to the Ukrainian Canadian experience. $1,500 is awarded to each finalist. Genres include literary non-fiction, fiction, poetry, young readers’ literature, play, screenplay and musical.
The Shevchenko Foundation is a leading nation-wide charitable organization entrusted to preserve, develop, and promote Ukrainian Canadian arts, heritage, community, and education. The KOBZAR Book Award is at the core of the Foundation’s literary arts program that includes the annual Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition.
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