Anna Porter

The Canadian War Museum’s Canvas of War, which toured the country throughout 2000–01, was the largest exhibition of Canadian war art ever organized. It featured the work of some of our best artists, including members of the celebrated Group of Seven, who had witnessed the slaughter of the thousands of young men who had fought in two world…

I am a fan of memoirs about publishing. For close to forty years, I have enjoyed reading them, and I still find them fascinating. The first two I read were Sir Stanley Unwin’s The Truth about Publishing and, later, The Truth about a Publisher. Sir Stanley was famous for publishing Bertrand Russell and…

Antanas Sileika and I must have been reading Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin at about the same time and for more or less the same reasons. It is a formidable work of history that deals with the deliberate mass murder of civilians in the territory that covers eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics—the “Bloodlands” of Snyder’s…

This story has haunted me my whole life and I am writing a novel inspired by a family anecdote. The events in my story occurred before my time. But I have tried to create a novel around these people, turned them into characters and given them lives. What the story says to me — and what I hope sets it apart from others on the subject — is that all of us — …