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Jill Culiner has won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biographies/Memoirs 2024

We are thrilled to announce that Jill Culiner has won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biographies/Memoirs 2024 for Those Absent On the Great Hungarian Plain!


About Jill Culiner:

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, and the Sahara. 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 book, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers, won the Joseph and Faye Tannenbaum Prize for Canadian Jewish History.


About the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards:

Marking its tenth successful year, the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards recognises and rewards the finest Canadian writing on Jewish themes and subjects in a variety of genres.



What the judges said about Those Absent:

"Writer, photographer and social critic Jill Culiner presents vignettes from what was planned as a six-week excursion to find traces of Jewish presence in rural Hungary, and evolved into a multi-year sojourn exploring memory, culture and hard truths about what can lie beneath the surface in the human heart. Those “absent” in the title are, of course, the Jews. The event the author chooses to epitomize their final disappearance from rural Hungary and the Great Hungarian Plain is the pogrom in the town of Kunmadaras in 1946, in which Holocaust survivors who had returned to the town were attacked by an organized mob, leaving several dead and numerous injured while the police declined to intervene. 


Jews as narrators stay offstage until close to the end of the book, so that the reader’s understanding advances through vivid, sympathetic but ultimately unsparing portraits of present-day inhabitants of the town who claim, at least initially, to have forgotten that there ever were any Jews living there, let alone that the town had hosted a pogrom. "





Our many congratulations to Jill - we're simply delighted that Those Absent has received the recognition it deserves.


The prologue of Those Absent On the Great Hungarian Plain can be read on our website here.

To read a Q&A with Deborah Kalb where they discuss Those Absent, click here.


Those Absent On the Great Hungarian Plain is available in paperback and ebook.

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