Sasha Colby

Biography

Sasha Colby's most recent book, The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance (ECW, 2023, ed. Susan Renouf), traces the oral history of factory labourer Irina Kylynych as it collides with the story of Elsie Kühn-Leitz, the Leica heiress imprisoned by the Gestapo on charges of "excessive humanity." The Matryoshka Memoirs won the 2026 Kobzar Book Award, the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2024 Gold Medal for Europe Non-Fiction, was shortlisted for Taste Canada’s 2024 Culinary Narrative Award, and has been translated into German and Hungarian. The audiobook is by Tantor Media.

Beyond the literary non-fiction of The Matryoshka Memoirs, Sasha’s SSHRC-funded work includes an ongoing biographical fiction project about French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson; a book of three original plays with a critical manifesto on dramatizing research, Staging Modernist Lives: H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Three Plays and Criticism (McGill-Queen's UP, 2017); a monograph on archaeology and 19th and 20th-century English and French literature, Stratified Modernism: The Poetics of Excavation from Gautier to Olson (Peter Lang, 2009); and Voicing the Mosaic, a large-scale student/community installation and performance project on language and identity in Surrey (2007). Sasha performs all 25 roles in her one-person play about poets H.D. and Ezra Pound (published as The Tree in Staging Modernist Lives) and has toured the performance in North America, Europe, and Asia.

For over a decade, Sasha has served as the director of SFU’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, a hybrid MA for working-aged adults. She is currently in the process of establishing the SFU GLS Centre for Narrative Arts—an international research hub and graduate training centre partnered with the Oxford Centre for Life Writing to promote research-informed storytelling.