...with Writing Biography (Ep. 94)

What on Earth is Going on?

Rosemary Sullivan is an acclaimed Canadian poet and biographer. She has written definitive biographies about Elizabeth Smart and Gwendolyn MacEwen as well as a book about the early life of Margaret Atwood. In 2015, Rosemary published Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva to widespread praise.

Ben sits down with Rosemary in Toronto to talk about what goes into making a biography (such as calling the CIA first), how she wrote Stalin's Daughter, and much more.

About the Guest

Biographer and poet Rosemary Sullivan is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. Her 14 books include the critically acclaimed Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille and Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion and Romantic Obsession. Shadow Maker, her biography of Gwendolyn MacEwen, won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. She has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Trudeau, and Jackman Fellowships and was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal by the Royal Society for her contributions to Literature and Culture. In 2012 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Learn more about Rosemary.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Video of Christopher Hitchens discussing his idea that religion was humanity's "first attempt"
• Episode 78 of this podcast, featuring political scientist Jonathan Rose
• Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein
• Oscar Wilde, a biography by Richard Ellmann
• The Writers' Trust Rising Stars program
• "The Long War Against Slavery", an article in the New Yorker from January 2020 by Casey Cep
• Video of Howard Stern on how Donald Trump's 2016 run for the presidency was a publicity stunt
• The Family, a Netflix miniseries documentary about an evangelical Christian group
• Varian's War, a made-for-television movie about the Holocaust
• The Death of Stalin, a 2017 satirical comedy directed by Armando Iannucci

The Quote of the Week

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. - Virginia Woolf