Jars Balan is the Co-Director of the Kule Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) in Edmonton. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto (Honours, English) and the University of Alberta (MA, Creative Writing). A freelance writer, editor, literary translator and former broadcaster. He is the author of Salt and Braided Bread: Ukrainian Life in Canada, issued by Oxford University Press in 1984, and has numerous published articles on many different aspects of the history of Ukrainians in Canada. His academic specialties are Ukrainian-Canadian literature, drama and church history. His translations from Ukrainian embrace fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and include the children’s book The Lilac King, by Lina Kostenko, which appeared in Kyiv in 1990.
Jars has both written on the history of Ukrainian and Canadian visual poetry and produced a body of original work in this tradition in Ukrainian as well as in English. He has also contributed his research and writing skills to documentary film projects such as the 2001 CBC series, Canada: A People’s History.
He is the representative of the Ukrainian Self-Reliance Association of Canada on the board of directors of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), and the UCC representative on the Canada Ukraine Foundation. Beginning in 1991, Jars has played a key role in developing the Kalyna Country Ecomuseum, a 20,000 sq. km. heritage conservation area and tourism destination region encompassing the historic Ukrainian rural bloc settlement northeast of Edmonton.
Jars has travelled extensively in Ukraine over a span of more than four decades. He has worked as a consultant on ecotourism projects in Kherson and Cherkasy oblasts, and has also participated in academic, literary and rural economic development conferences in Kyiv, Chernivtsi, Cherkasy and Lviv.
