Jill Culiner

Jill Culiner's Bio

Born in New York, raised in Toronto, Jill Culiner, writer, social critical artist, and photographer has spent most of her life in France, England, Germany, Hungary, Turkey, Holland, and North Africa. She presently lives in a 400-year-old inn in France, so chaotic and strange that it has been classified as a museum.

Her photographic exhibition about the First and Second World Wars, La Mémoire Effacée, toured France, Canada, and Hungary under the auspices of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNESCO. Her non-fiction, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers won the Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Prize for Canadian Jewish History and was shortlisted for the ForeWord Magazine Award. Her biography of a nineteenth-century rebel Yiddish poet and singer, A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard, was published by Claret Press in 2022, and her portrait of Hungarian village life was published by Claret Press in 2024.

What Jill's Followers Say…
Culiner’s work is intriguing as she explores the past and present of Jewish life in Europe. The author’s prose brings this story to life as she retraces the steps of a group of people who include her own ancestors. This is a group who were faced with incredible odds in seeking a more prosperous life in a more tolerant place.
- H. Slowinski, Author
Part history, part detective story, part personal memoir, Jill Culiner brings to life a cast of characters fitting for a Dickensian novel, deals with the fallibility of memory, the nature of prejudice and persecution, and the past as both history and fiction.
-Dr Michael Talalay, Writer, Lecturer
Regents University London