Acclaimed Writer of Literary and Creative Nonfiction
Recently Published
Writing Ukraine
Myrna's term as writer in residence at Athabasca University began shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In this essay, based on her writer-in-residence lecture at Athabasca University, Kostash offers a self-critical reflection on her body of work and considers how her visits to Ukraine and the ongoing war have nuanced her writing about and understanding of Ukrainian Canadian identity.
Award Winning
Ghosts in a Photograph a chronicle
Winner of the 2024 KOBZAR Book Award - Shevchenko Foundation
View book >
Recent Articles
When the full-scale war against Ukraine was launched by Russia in February 2022, Myrna began following the lives and thoughts of Ukraine's writers during the conflict. She distilled these into an essay, "Dialogues On War: Sometimes the best defence is a book,” that was published in the publications of The Writers' Union of Canada and the Writers' Guild of Alberta.
About Myrna
Myrna Kostash is an acclaimed writer of literary and creative nonfiction who makes her home in Edmonton when she is not travelling in pursuit of her varied literary interests and passions. These have taken her from school halls in Vancouver, BC, to Ukrainian weddings in Two Hills, Alberta; from the site of the mass grave of Cree warriors in Battleford, Saskatchewan, to a fishers’ meeting in Digby, Nova Scotia; from the British Library in London, UK, to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. She is inspired in her work by her childhood in the Ukrainian-Canadian community of Edmonton, her rites of passage through the Sixties in the US, Canada and Europe, by her discovery of the New Journalism and feminism in the 1970s, by her rediscovery of her western Canadian roots in the 1980s, and most recently, by her return to her spiritual sources in Byzantium and the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) Church.
Author photo by Markian Lozowchuk/Redux
News & Events
Regional Book of the Year
Myrna's most recent book, Writing Ukraine, is short-listed for Regional Book of the Year by the Book Publishers' Association of Alberta.
Book Presentation at St. Peter's College
On February 26 & 27, 2025, Myrna visited St. Peter's College near Humboldt SK where she gave a public reading and PowerPoint presentation from Ghosts In a Photograph and led a creative writing class in Creative Nonfiction.
Keynote Address
The visiting Canadian Literature scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine, Mariya Shymchyshyn, organized a one-day Symposium on March 14 2025, at the University of Manitoba, "Identity and Poetics of Ukrainian Canadian Literature", and invited Myrna to give the opening Keynote address. Myrna is not a scholar but a writer of literary nonfiction. She decided to present a highly personal account of her fifty years' worth of books, "Astonishment in the World."
Guest Speaker at the cultural centre of St John's Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral
On May 26, 2025, Myrna was the guest speaker at an evening reception at the cultural centre of St John's Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral, hosted by Edmonton members of The Order of St Andrew.
Her presentation took its inspiration from a blog that Myrna wrote regularly about her experience as a born-again Ukrainian Orthodox woman, "What Am I Doing Here?" until the full-out Russian war on Ukraine in 2022. Her final two posts looked at that war through the lens of the Orthodox Church, in Russia and Ukraine.
Being Ukrainian Orthodox in a Time of War Part One >
What is Peace in a Time of War >
Conversation with Tom Radford
December 4, 2024 Myrna was in conversation with Tom Radford, Edmonton film-maker and author of an energetic and deeply-moving memoir, of his maternal grandparents, Peggy & Balmer: Two Journalists at the Edge of History
To launch her latest publication, Writing Ukraine, from Athabasca University Press, Myrna was in conversation with Prof. Jeffrey Stepinsky at Grant MacEwan University
Thursday, December 5th, 2024 at 6:00 PM
An evening of deep reflection that offers a rare opportunity to hear from the award-winning author whose work delves into the intersection of history, Canadian identity, and Ukrainian heritage.
Book Launch: Myrna Kostash, Ghosts in a Photograph
Thursday, November 14th, 2024 at 6:30 PM
Join us in person at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada as we proudly host the Saskatoon book launch of Ghosts in a Photograph by acclaimed nonfiction writer Myrna Kostash. This mesmerizing book explores the journey of Kostash's grandparents from Galicia, now Ukraine, to Alberta at the turn of the twentieth century.
The book's genius is in how it weaves Ukrainian and Canadian political history, contextualizing the stories of two familes (one homesteaders, one working-class Edmontonian) with the historic struggles for Ukrainian independence and the genocidal "clearing of the plains" in Canada.
With Kostash in attendance to read from and speak about her book, this will be an extraordinary literary event.
Media
Myrna delivers her Keynote; behind her are scholars in Poland and Ukraine joining by Zoom; a view from the end of the boardroom; Mariya Shymchyshyn, and graduate student Sophie Shields who presented a paper on Myrna's Ghosts in a Photograph
Presentation by Myrna
In 2021, as part of an online Roundtable on the subject of Land, hosted by the Indigenous Ukrainian Relationship Initiative (Myrna is a founding member) Myrna presented a PowerPoint in which she told the story of Ukrainian homesteaders on Treaty Six Territory and of her own journey from that heritage. Here are the images >
Myrna Kostash named Athabasca University’s 2022-23 Writer in Residence
NeWest Press Podcast
Photos
Zemlya/Nanaskomun, We Give Thanks for the Land was a Ukrainian-Canadian and Aboriginal Ceremonial Exchange of Gifts presented to both communities in September 2012 by Myrna Kostash and Sharon Pasula, Metis activist. The program booklet for Shumka Dancers' recent new production, Ancestors and Elders, April 2018 and March 2019 states: "We acknowledge the foresight of Myrna Kostash and Sharon Pasula whose project entitled Zemlya/Nanaskomun first brought these stories to our attention."
From the Blog
- What Is Peace In a Time of War?I try to imagine – fifty-eight years after the event – the impact on the Vietnamese, whether armed Viet Cong in jungle trenches or villagers cowering under a hail of ammo – of massed, youthful choruses, halfway across the planet, screaming in unison Make Love Not War! And how Read more >
- Being Ukrainian Orthodox in a Time of War: Part OneI began writing this post near the end of February 2022, on tenterhooks along with much of the world about the likelihood of a war being unleashed by Russian military forces on the sovereign territory of Ukraine. As I post it, this is Day 125 of Russia’s war on Ukraine and its people. July 12 Read more >