Sandra Louise Birdsell, CM (née Bartlette) (born 22 April 1942)[1] is a Canadian novelist and short story writer of Métis and Mennonite heritage from Morris, Manitoba.
She lived most of her early life in Morris, Manitoba, where the family moved after her father joined the army in 1943.
In January 2007, Birdsell began a four-month term as the Carol Shields writer in residence at the University of Winnipeg.
Birdsell's first book, a collections of interconnected short stories, Night Travellers(1982), is set in the imaginary Manitoba town of Agassiz, and concerns the large Lafreniere family: the teenaged sisters Betty, Lureen and Truda, their Mennonite mother Mika and their Métis father Maurice and the girls’ maternal grandparents, Oma and Opa Thiessen.
Birdsell's first novel, published in 1989, is "an evocative magic realist portrait of the fictional town of Agassiz", which won the W.H.
The word Russländer means "Russians" in German and her mother and maternal grandparents were Mennonite emigrants from Russia.
It is the story of Katherine (Katya) Vogt, and her Mennonite family's life in Russia from the end of 1910,[11] until she, her husband, two sisters, and grandparents emigrated to Canada in 1923.
[12] The story begins with the family living on the prosperous Mennonite estate of Abram Suddermann in Ukraine, where Katya's father is the overseer.
Life then becomes much harder when World War I begins and there is suspicion as to the loyalty of the Mennonites because they speak German.
Katya, her husband, sisters, and grandparents eventually emigrate to Canada in 1923, to settle in Manitoba: "Between 1923 and 1930, nearly 25,000 Mennonites fled violence that erupted in the Soviet Union".