Long-time Writers’ Union member Eve Zaremba died peacefully at age 94, with the assistance of MAID, at home on October 8, 2025, lovingly held by her wife of 47 years, Ottie Lockey. We will always remember her courage, determination, curiosity, and humour.
Born in Kalisz, Poland, nine-year-old Eve fled to the UK with her mother after the outbreak of World War II and later emigrated to Canada, first living in Hamilton but soon putting down roots in Toronto. Although Eve started her studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, she took 18 years studying at night to earn a BA in History at the University of Toronto. Eve worked in marketing, advertising, and research and with the public library. By the early 1970s she had turned to writing and became a central figure in Toronto’s women’s movement, co-founding the Women’s Place, the Lesbian Organization of Toronto, Women Against Violence Against Women, and the feminist newspaper Broadside.
Eve was a writer of vital importance to Canada’s feminist literary scene. Her first book, Privilege of Sex, published by House of Anansi in 1974, was an edited anthology of works by mostly unpublished Canadian women writers who were active from 1830 to 1930, and whose words still resonate today. Privilege of Sex will be reissued by McClelland & Stewart in 2028.
In the early 1970s Eve was part of the Toronto literary scene with her friends Graeme Gibson, Marion Engel, and Margaret Atwood, but she didn’t qualify for membership in TWUC as the editor of Privilege of Sex. It was only later, in 1978, that she joined the Writers’ Union thanks to the publication by PaperJacks of the first novel in her Helen Keremos thriller series, A Reason to Kill.
The ground-breaking mysteries in the Helen Keremos series featured the first-ever fictional lesbian detective, who was as intelligent, direct, and bluntly honest as was Eve herself. The second and third books in the series, Work for a Million and Beyond Hope, were released by Eve and Ottie’s small publishing company Amanita, which also issued Susan Crean’s The Sins of the Fathers and Susan G. Cole’s Pornography and the Sex Crisis. Work for a Million was adapted by Amanda Deibert and illustrated by Selena Goulding as a graphic novel, which was published in 2022 by McClelland & Stewart.
Eve’s memoir The Broad Side was published in 2015 by Insomniac Press. Illustrated with family photos ranging from pre-WW II Poland to scenes from twentieth-century lesbian family life in downtown Toronto, The Broad Side traces Eve’s family’s roots, including her brother Andrej’s role in the Polish resistance and his survival of Auschwitz, her father Jerzy’s service in the Polish Army under British Command, and the family’s emigration to Canada.
For many Zaremba’s greatest impact was as a lesbian role model and independent thinker. In the early 1970s, when few lesbians dared to be visible, Eve was out and proud; she always had her own car, and collected hubcaps — often on display at her parties — while setting an example for younger women of how to live an authentic gay life. Her intellectual spirit was impacted by the advent of a communist Poland, a political event which shaped her values and informed her analysis of world events.
Eve reveled in political conversation, but she took pleasure in other pursuits as well. She loved the outdoors — canoeing, hiking, mushrooming, and camping — and built the rustic cabin that she and Ottie lived in during summer holidays from 1989 to 2004 on Gabriola Island, BC. In 1986 Eve transformed a Chevy van into a cozy livable mobile home which she and Ottie drove across Canada, through the United States, and all the way down to Cabo San Lucas in Baja, Mexico.
Most of her long life, however, was spent in Toronto, a city she loved. She tracked many of the city’s major projects, from the installation of the first subway line in 1954 to the latest waterfront development in the Portlands district. As a food lover and committed carnivore, Eve was an enthusiastic member of a select meat-eating dinner club of feminist cultural workers whose boisterous discussions were truly epic. Eve loved doing things with her strong hands: hammering nails in tiles on the roof of a friend’s cottage, boiling meat bones for the perfect borscht, creating artistic boxes filled with found objects, or painstakingly tending to her carefully potted plants and orchids.
Eve shared her life with Ottie for close to five decades. Her love was deep and true, and she is dearly missed.
Photos: Portrait of Eve Zaremba by Nadine Arpin, commissioned by The ArQuives, 2019.
Eve Zaremba, Margaret Atwood, and Graeme Gibson in Pelee Island, 2016.
Eve and her wife Ottie with their new rescue chihuahua Sasha, 2024.
