Jill Culiner

"A bad penny always turns up," said my grandmother the day I was born. It was Friday the 13th.

Later, in 1957, foiling the ill wishes of my many detractors, I began an autobiographical work: My life in Eastern Europe During the Second World War. Little did it matter I had never left North America. That I was a post-war child. Talent will out. My mother, in a frenzy of spring-cleaning (and, of course, jealousy) chucked the manuscript in the garbage.

Abandoning formal education (one of us had to go), I headed for Bright Lights, Big City and Career Success as a b-girl, disco dancer, model, television hostess, file clerk, donut shop salesperson, poodle bather, belly dancer (in Turkey), waitress in a self-service restaurant (?), newspaper delivery girl (in Germany), radio broadcaster (in France), etc. Then traded that whole lot for Fame and Fortune as an artist and photographer.

I did manage to snag a tiny bit of Fame crossing large chunks of Lithuania, Spain, Germany, Poland, England, France, Romania, Hungary, and Austria on foot, exhibiting my work throughout Europe and in Canada, getting a photography book about the Sahara published in Paris - Sans S'abolir Pourtant. But Fortune escaped me. Determined, now, to get some of that between my jaws, I turned to writing.

My romance novel, Felicity's Power, was published in Australia by Power of Love Publishing (the truth, I swear.) Power of Love went bankrupt. My next book, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers, about Romanian immigration to Canada in 1900, was published by Sumach Press, Toronto. Sumach also decided to publish my new mystery, Slanderous Tongue. Fortune is, however, still eluding me. And, as for Fame as a writer, I've decided to creep up on it slowly. Very, very slowly.
 

Selected Bibliography

Slanderous Tongue. Toronto: Sumach Press, 2007
A village employee disappears and a nosy Canadian ethnologist decides to snuffle out sordid secrets and solve a murder. This is a voyage from vanished rural France to today’s industrialized countryside.

Awards:
Winner, The Joseph and Faye Tannenbaum Prize for Canadian History, 2005, for Finding Home
Shortlisted for the Foreword Magazine Prize, Essay and History category, 2005, for Finding Home

Website:
www.jill-culiner.com

Email:
contact@jill-culiner.com