“As a poet and writer, [Rosemary Sullivan] knows that life is lived not as theory but as practice, that . . . you can understand nothing about a place without listening to individual people and their stories.” — Margaret Atwood

Incomparable writer, activist, and world traveller Rosemary Sullivan has at long last written a book about herself, about her life quest to “meet the world, to celebrate its richness, to face its darkness.”

And what a fascinating book it is! Comprised of 21 essays spanning 5 decades and multiple continents, Where the World Was offers a vivid portrait of a writer who is instinctively drawn to other cultures and places.

Whether writing about a solo vacation inside the Iron Curtain, meeting the reclusive writer Elizabeth Smart in a dilapidated cottage in the English countryside, reflecting on how Chilean society responded to Pinochet’s coup, or tracking down the people who knew Svetlana Alliluyeva for Stalin’s Daughter, Sullivan delivers a master class in cultural studies, human rights advocacy, and empathy for the human condition.

ROSEMARY SULLIVAN is an acclaimed biographer, poet and editor. She is the author of nine books of non-fiction, including Villa Air-Bel, which was awarded a Canadian Jewish Book Award; Labyrinth Of Desire: Women, Passion and Romantic Obsession; By Heart: Elizabeth Smart—A Life and the #1 bestseller The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Her biography of Gwendolyn MacEwen, Shadow Maker, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction, the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award, the Toronto Book Award and the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography. Sullivan’s journalistic pieces have won her a National Magazine Awards silver medal and a Western Journalism first prize for travelogue; her academic honours include Killam, Trudeau and Guggenheim fellowships. She lives in Toronto, where she is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

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