Chrystia Freeland Named 2013 Festival Marshal

Award-winning author, journalist and media personality Chrystia Freeland will serve as the 2013 marshal of the Bloor West Village Toronto Ukrainian Festival from September 13-15. Freeland was born in Peace River, Alberta, and is of Ukrainian descent on her mother’s side.

Now in its 17th year, the Bloor West Village Toronto Ukrainian Festival is a free, three-day family-focused showcase of the most widely identifiable aspects of Ukrainian culture, attracting diverse audiences of nearly 600,000 from across Canada, the US and abroad. Highlights will include the crowd-pleasing parade, international and local performers, delicious food, an outdoor beer garden, cultural displays, a midway, a film festival, vendors and street dances.

The parade that launches each Festival has been led by marshals including the Rt. Hon. John Turner, businessman and philanthropist James Temerty, music legend Randy Bachman, investigative journalist Victor Malarek, Senator Raynell Andreychuk, media celebrities Luba Goy, Mimi Kuzyk and Ted Woloshyn, community activist Maria Szkambara, former vice-president of TorStar and Metroland Media Group Ron Lenyk, and former Ontario Education Minister Gerard Kennedy.

Festival chair Jurij Klufas said his organizing committee is honoured that Chrystia Freeland will take part in the 2013 event. A Rhodes Scholar, Freeland began her career in journalism as a stringer in Ukraine, writing for the Financial Times, The Washington Post and The Economist. She then worked for the Financial Times in England, as deputy editor, editor of its weekend edition, editor of FT.com, UK news editor, Moscow bureau chief and Eastern Europe correspondent.

From 1999 to 2001, Freeland was deputy editor of The Globe and Mail. Now living in New York, she is the managing director and editor, Consumer News, at Thomson Reuters. Her most recent book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (2012) was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2013 Lionel Gelber Prize for non-fiction reporting on foreign affairs.

For more about the Festival, please visit www.ukrainianfestival.com.

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Chrystia Freeland