Rhea Tregebov is a Canadian poet, novelist, and children’s writer who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia and elsewhere, and worked extensively as a freelance editor. Her writing is characterized by engagement with the extraordinary lived experience of ordinary life. Her eighth collection of poetry, Talking to Strangers, was released by Véhicule Press in 2024. The Montreal Review of Books notes: “To be a flower in Rhea Tregebov’s garden, a bird in her window, a passerby on the street, is to be loved indiscriminately. This generosity of feeling is palpable in every line of Talking to Strangers, the eighth book by an enduring voice in Canadian poetry.” Tregebov’s novel, Rue des Rosiers (2019), addresses the 1982 terrorist attack on a Jewish deli in Paris. Her first novel, The Knife Sharpener’s Bell (2009), follows the reverse immigration of a Depression-era Canadian family to the Soviet Union. She has also published five popular children’s picture books, among them the Sasha series, illustrated by Hélène Desputeaux, creator of the Caillou television series. Tregebov has edited numerous anthologies, including Arguing with the Storm, an anthology of stories by women writers which she co-translated from the Yiddish.
Tregebov was born in Saskatoon and raised in Winnipeg, where she received her undergraduate education at the University of Manitoba. She did graduate work in literature at Cornell and Boston Universities, receiving her MA in English & American literature from BU. After working in Toronto for many years as a freelance author and editor, she moved to Vancouver in 2004 to take up a position in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, where she taught workshops in poetry, translation, children’s literature and fiction. In 2017, she retired from teaching at UBC; she now holds the position of Associate Professor Emerita. From 2021 to2023 she was Chair of The Writers Union of Canada. She is currently a board member for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes.
Talking to Strangers won the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry as well as the 2025 Western Canada Jewish Book Award for poetry. The book was also long-listed for the Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize. Her poems have also earned the Pat Lowther Award, Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award, and the Malahat Review Long Poem Award. Rue des Rosiers was short-listed for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and won the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction. The Knife Sharpener’s Bell was a Globe and Mail Jim Bartley Top 5 book, won the J.I. Segal Award and was shortlisted for the Kobzar Award.
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