Rhea Tregebov

Born in Saskatoon and raised in Winnipeg, Rhea received her undergraduate education in Winnipeg. She did postgraduate studies at Cornell and Boston Universities.

For many years she worked as a freelance writer and editor in Toronto, where she also taught creative writing for Ryerson Continuing Education. She is now Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches poetry and translation.

Tregebov is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, most recently (alive): New and selected poems (Wolsak & Wynn, 2004). She has also published five popular children's picture books including The Big Storm and What-If Sara, which are set in Winnipeg. She has edited ten anthologies of essays, poetry and fiction, most recently Arguing with the Storm. Her work has received a number of literary prizes, including the Tiny Torgi award (for The Big Storm) as well as the Pat Lowther Award, Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award, and the Malahat Review Long Poem Award for her poetry. The Knife Sharpener's Bell is her first novel.

From the Author:

I made the transition from poet to novelist because a plot seized me by the throat. The Knife Sharpener's Bell originated in two pieces of family history. One is the story of my maternal grandfather's plans, in 1935, to take his family back to Mother Russia. He had left Tzarist Russia before the First World War and met my grandmother in Canada. Both shared strong left-wing beliefs. And when the economy came crashing down (then as now) in the Western World, my grandparents decided the best thing to do for their family would be to take them to the Workers' Paradise, the Soviet Union. As fate would have it, my grandfather's trip back in 1935 to the Soviet Union did not result in permission to immigrate. But that alternate history and its consequences has haunted me all my life. As has my mother's story of hiding on the train that was to take her father to Halifax for the trip to Europe. This scene is the prologue to the novel.

The second bit of history has to do with Vladlen Furman, to whom (with my mother) the book is dedicated. This distant cousin, who was living at the time in Moscow, became active in one of the early dissident movements in the Soviet Union. In the anti-Semitic hysteria of those post-war years, he was arrested, along with a number of other young people. Stalin arranged for a show trial in 1950. These young people, whose ages ranged from 17 to 21, were prosecuted for treason and terrorism and found guilty. Their crime had been to think that perhaps socialism had not reached perfection within the Soviet state.

Our family in Canada did not discover the truth of Vladlen's story until 1975, when my Canadian-born mother first travelled to the Soviet Union and met the surviving family. Writing this novel covered the span of a decade as I tried to uncover the meaning of this personal history and the reflections that it casts on our tempestuous present. I was writing during what seemed like the zenith of the capitalist system. This story of the Depression and its effects now carries further resonance.