The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance by Sasha Colby, published by ECW Press, was named the winner of 2026 Kobzar Book Award.

Presented biennially by Winnipeg-based The Shevchenko Foundation (TSF),  the award recognizes outstanding literary works on topics with a tangible connection to the Ukrainian Canadian experience.

The winner receives $25,000, and the finalists each receive $1,500.

Also shortlisted for the 2026 prize were the non-fiction title No Place Like Home: Enemy Alien Internment in Canada during the Great War by Bohdan S. Kordan (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and the graphic novel Red Harvest by Michael Cherkas (NBM Publishing).

The jury, consisting of Kay Rollans, Niigaan Sinclair, and 2024 award winner Myrna Kostash, said that The Matryoshka Memoirs “beautifully collages the past with contemporary Ukrainian experiences” in its exploration of the experiences of Colby’s grandmother, a forced labourer in Nazi Germany, and the author’s discovery of the parallel story of the woman who pulled her grandmother from servitude and was later imprisoned by the Gestapo.