By Veronika Ivanytska for MacEwan University’s Ukrainian Resource and Development Centre. Republished for MacEwan’s 2026 Ukraine Week.
Nearly 50 years after its publication, Myrna Kostash’s All of Baba’s Children continues to prompt Canadians to consider questions of identity, heritage and belonging.
At the heart of the 1977 landmark book was Kostash’s realization of the time that came before her parents’ and grandparents’ immigration.
“They had a life before they came here,” Myrna Kostash reflected at Fifty Years of All of Baba’s Children: A Symposium. The event, hosted in July 2026 and organized by MacEwan’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications and Ukrainian Resource Development Centre, marked her book’s place as an enduring classic in Canadian literature.
As writers, scholars, artists and community members gathered at MacEwan, they explored the book’s continuing relevance to Ukrainian-Canadian life, public memory, reconciliation and connections with contemporary Ukraine.
A screening of the film Myrna Kostash: Here and a conversation with Kostash led by Sheena Rossiter, assistant professor in MacEwan’s Department of Communications, were followed by panel discussions of Kostash’s literary legacy, collective memory, feminism and Indigenous-Ukrainian relationships.
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Dr. Mariya Shymchyshyn, professor and chair of literary theory and world literature at Kyiv National Linguistics University and currently a visiting professor and research affiliate at the University of Manitoba, reflected on how All of Baba’s Children helped her navigate displacement during Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Literary critic, researcher and professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Dr. Olha Poliukhovych, joined Dr. Jeffrey Stepnisky, associate professor of sociology at MacEwan, to examine Ghosts in a Photograph, a 2022 chronicle by Kostash.
Dr. Lindy Ledohowsky, who teaches Canadian and postcolonial literature at the University of Waterloo, reflected on a 20-year friendship with Kostash that began through her scholarship on Ukrainian-Canadian literature.
The symposium concluded with a reading of “Poets, Truth, and Reconciliation,” bringing questions of land, memory and history into dialogue through poetry.
The symposium showed that the conversations Kostash’s book sparked continue to raise questions about who belongs, what communities remember and how identities are shaped.