These days Ukraine is a common subject not just for us, but for all the people around the world. It is because of the war against them by Russians. In this backdrop, it is appropriate to talk about Ukrainian writers as they are the visionary eyes of Ukraine. The material for this article was taken from Outlook. Here are 10 Ukrainian writers whom you should not neglect when choosing to read:
1. Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa. He is a Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish-American poet, critic, translator, and professor. He lost his hearing when he was four and has been writing deafness as a form of dissent against tyranny and violence.
His first full-length book of poems, ‘Dancing in Odessa’ (2004), draws on the memories of a haunted city.
The 44-year-old poet’s 2019 collection, ‘Deaf Republic,’ which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a parable in poems that captures the plight of an occupied country in the time of political unrest.
2. Oleksandr Irvanets
Born in 1961 in Lviv, Irvanets Oleksandr has resided in Irpin, the Kyiv region, since 1993. From the beginning of the 2000s, his literary endeavours have veered around dramaturgy and prose.
His works have been translated into English, German, French, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Belarusian, Russian, Italian and Croatian. In 1985, Oleksandr founded a literary performance group ‘Bu-Ba-Bu’, along with fellow writers Yuri Andrukhovych and Viktor Neborak.
Its syllables derive from burlesque (burlesk), a puppet show or farce (balahan), and buffoonery (bufonada).
The group gained enormous popularity in Ukraine during the late 1980s and the 1990s.
In his latest novel, ‘Kharkiv-1938’, Irvanets employs dark humour to portray the alternative history of Ukraine, with Kharkiv as the capital that managed to preserve its independence amid the 1918-1919 civil war.
3. Viktor Neborak
Victor Neborak (60) is a poet, prose writer, literary critic, and translator based in Lviv. He is one of the three founding members of Bu-Ba-Bu, which has played the central role in Ukraine’s cultural revival. In his meticulously structured second collection, ‘Litaiucha holova’ (The Flying Head, 1990), stood out for its linguistic and poetic experimentation: it circled around the carnival, eroticism, rock music, experimentation in form, and general revelry. In his subsequent collections, he zeroes in on the modalities of everyday life experiences.
Neborak has also written two books of memoiristic essays about many of his contemporaries: ‘Return to Leopolis’ (1998) and ‘Introduction to Bu-Ba-Bu’ (2001).
4. Artem Chapeye
The 40-year-old author was born and raised in the small Western Ukrainian city of Kolomyia. He has spent much of the last twenty years living in Kyiv. He worked as a reporter during the war in Donbas. Three of his books — ‘Traveling with Mamayota in Search of Ukraine’ (2011), ‘The Red Zone’ (2014) and ‘There Goes the Neighbourhood’ (2015) — have been on the shortlist of the BBC Book of the Year Award. In 2015, Artem together with Kateryna Serhatskova published their collection of journalistic stories from Donbas “The Three-Letter War”.
5. Tamara Ivanovna Hundorova
Sixty-six-year-old Hundorova is a literary critic, culturologist, writer and the head of the Theory of Literature Department at the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She is also a professor and dean at the Ukrainian Free University. As a member of PEN Ukraine, she spoke out against the Russian invasion in the recent video, and said she saw hope in the fact that “the best, the strongest people of our home have taken their weapons and went to the front”.
“All the artists associating themselves with Ukraine should be here because that is where the cord that connects us is. (It is) our language, our culture that gives us power and opportunity to fight,” she said.
6. Kozlovskiy Ihor Anatoliyovych
Born in 1954 in Makiivka, Donetsk region, Anatoliyovych is a scientist, a poet and a prose writer. A former prisoner of Kremlin, he was captured by militants of the so-called “Donetsk Peoples Republic” and was in captivity for almost two years until December 27, 2017.
Author of poetry collections and prose works, as well as more than 50 scientific books, he actively advocates the release of political prisoners in Russia and in the occupied territories of Donbas and Crimea.
7. Anna Bagriana
A novelist, poet, playwright, and translator, Bagriana was born in the city of Fastiv, Kyiv Oblast, and has worked as a radio and television journalist. A member of the National Writer’s Union of Ukraine, the Association of Ukrainian Writers, and the Slavic Academy of Literature and the Arts (Bulgaria), Bagriana (40) has published seven books of poetry, two collections of plays, and three novels: ‘The Etymology of Blood’ (2008), ‘Such a Strange Love This is’ (Kyiv 2010), and ‘The Pesterer’ (Kyiv, 2012). She has also compiled and translated an anthology of contemporary poetry from the Republic of Macedonia.
Her novel, ‘Such a Strange Love This is’ was translated into Macedonian.
8. Svetlana Alexievich
The Ukraine-born Belarusian Nobel laureate is an investigative journalist, an essayist, and an oral historian, who writes in Russian. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time’.
She is the first writer from Belarus to receive the award. In her 1997 book, ‘Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, she records the tragic event through the stories of people. ‘The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II’ (1985) shows how more than 200 Soviet women, who dreamed of becoming brides, became soldiers in 1941, participating on a par with men in the most terrible war of the 20th century.
9. Anastasia Dmitruk
The 31-year-old poet writes in Russian and Ukrainian languages. She earlier worked as an information security specialist. Her poem, ‘Never Ever Can We Be Brothers’, written in response to the 2014 Russian occupation of Crimea, is her most popular poem.
The poem celebrates the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and rejects “‘Great Russia’. The YouTube video of Dmitruk reading her poem has got more than a million hits, and the poem has been discussed in the press. It has also become a target of many parodies, especially by Russian readers who consider the poem ‘Russophobic’.
10. Serhiy Zhadan
Widely considered to be a ‘rockstar poet’, Zhadan is also a novelist, essayist, and translator. Born in Starobilsk, Luhansk Oblast, he taught Ukrainian and world literature from 2000 to 2004. Since then he has worked as a freelance writer.
He is credited with having revolutionized Ukrainian poetry with his verses, which are less sentimental and revive the style of 1920s Ukrainian avant-garde writers like Mykhaylo Semenko or Mike Johanssen. Most of his poems draw upon his homeland: the industrial landscapes of East Ukraine.
His latest novel, ‘The Orphanage (2021),’ excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the conflict in eastern Ukraine.