Skrypuch?!
How do you pronounce that in English? Like this: SKRIP-ick. Would you like to hear Marsha pronounce her own name? Listen here.
Short bio:
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch is the author of 24+ books for young people, yet she didn’t read until age 9. She now considers dyslexia to be a gift. Her scrupulously researched historical fiction and narrative non-fiction focuses on refugees and war from a young person’s perspective. Her books have won many honors, but her favorites are readers’ choice awards, of which she’s won many. Marsha has a Master of Library Science degree and worked as a librarian for the federal government before she began writing books. She considers herself a librarian-detective (and also a princess, but that’s another story).
Her best-known book is Making Bombs for Hitler. Her newest is Winterkill.
Shorter bio:
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch is a Ukrainian Canadian author acclaimed for her nonfiction and historical fiction, including Making Bombs for Hitler, The War Below, Stolen Girl, Don’t Tell the Nazis, Trapped in Hitler’s Web, Traitors Among Us, and Winterkill. She was awarded the Order of Princess Olha by the President of Ukraine for her writing. She is banned for life by Russia for her writing. Marsha lives in Brantford, Ontario, and you can visit her online at calla.com
Longer bio:
Marsha tricked her teachers into thinking she knew how to read until it all caught up with her in grade 4 when she failed the provincial reading exam. Adding insult to injury, they made her repeat the whole year.
As the tallest and oldest kid in the class, she didn’t want to be seen learning to read with little skinny books, so she taught herself how to read by taking out the fattest book in the children’s section of the Brantford Public Library — Oliver Twist. She kept on renewing it for a whole year.
Reading that book was a turning point in her life. She decided that she loved reading big fat fiction, and wanted to write it too. She devoured novels by the gallon.
Her grade 10 English teacher sent her to the vice principal’s office because she asked too many questions in class.
She was placed in enriched English as punishment and loved every minute of it. She took a degree in English at Western University in London Ontario. She needed a language option to complete her degree but she wasn’t very good in French so she stupidly signed up for Russian. Everyone else in Russian class was a native speaker and Marsha didn’t even know the alphabet. She made herself flash cards and practiced each morning on the bus as she went to school. She got the lowest mark in the class, but she did pass!
Upon graduating, she backpacked around Europe, and then took the first job she could get when she got home: selling industrial supplies. She was the first woman in Canada to sell industrial supplies. Marsha taught herself how to design grinding wheels, recommend drills and so on and gained the reputation of being “the cutting tool expert of Southwestern Ontario.”
While selling industrial supplies was interesting, Marsha never forgot her first dream, which was to become an author. She went back to school and got her Master’s degree in library science, figuring this would help her with research techniques. She worked as a librarian for a brief time, but then turned her hand to writing.
She wrote a big fat novel and got 100 rejections for it. She set that book aside and wrote Silver Threads. Expecting to be rejected 100 times as well, she sent it out a dozen publishers all at once. Within two weeks, three publishers had already approached her.
That book was published in 1996.
A year later, she went back to that big fat 100-times rejected novel, tore it apart, and rewrote it bit by bit. It ultimately became five separate books: The Hunger (Dundurn, 1999), Nobody’s Child (Dundurn, 2003), Daughter of War (Fitzhenry & Whiteside 2008), Aram’s Choice (Fitzhenry & Whiteside 2006) and Call Me Aram (Fitzhenry & Whiteside 2009).
Marsha’s had a book out pretty much every year since 1996. Her books seem to follow a general theme — they’re nearly all about young people plunged in the midst of war or oppression. She is best known for her two WWII trilogies: Stolen Girl (originally published as Stolen Child), Making Bombs for Hitler, and The War Below (originally published as Underground Soldier) comprise the first; and Don’t Tell the Nazis (originally published as Don’t Tell the Enemy, Trapped in Hitler’s Web and Traitors Among Us comprise the second. Her most recent book is Winterkill, set during the Holodomor in 1930s Ukraine, the Stalin-induced famine-genocide. These books are available in many countries, have been translated into different languages and have won lots of awards.
Would you like to learn more?
View awards and honours.
Here’s my Amazon page in your country.