Vortex: Vasyl Stus' Selected Early Poetry
Author: Vasyl Stus
Translators: Bohdan Tokarsky, Nina Murray
Vortex: Vasyl Stus’ Selected Early Poetry is the first professional book-length volume of Stus’ poetry in English translation. The book features more than a decade of Stus’ work, from his earliest texts to the period before his arrest by the KGB in 1972. A book of bold experimentation and virtuoso poetic versatility, Vortex captures Stus’ artistic evolution and the shifting political landscape of the USSR during a crucial period, …
The Ukrainian Intelligentsia and Genocide: The Struggle for History, Language, and Culture in the 1920s and 1930s
Author: Viktoria A. Malko
Translator: Viktoria A. Malko
Viktoria Malko examines the existential threats and ideological choices the Ukrainian intelligentsia faced as the first group targeted during the Holodomor genocide. Due to its influential patriotism and its leadership of Ukraine’s strong tradition of struggle for national liberation, the “brain of the nation”—the intelligentsia —became the epicentre of the Soviet-orchestrated genocide…
Ukraine, the Middle East, and the West
Author: Thomas Prymak
Translator: Nadia Zavorotna
This fascinating and fluidly written book is unique in that it is the first scholarly monograph to treat Ukraine's relations to the world outside eastern Europe. Thomas Prymak addresses geographical knowledge, international travel, political conflicts, historical relations with religiously diverse neighbours, artistic developments, and literary and language contacts to smash…
Solomea: Star of Opera's Golden Age
Author: Andriy Semotiuk
Translator: Halyna Stashkiw
Solomea Krushelnytska was Ukraine's greatest opera star and a leading lyric-dramatic soprano in the Golden Age of opera in the first decade of the 1900s. Known as the soprano who “rescued” Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, her legacy is revered in Ukraine and her life is only now coming to light in Europe and North America. The English-language book, released in 2022,…
The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural Study of the Shistdesiatnyky
Author: Simone Attilio Bellezza
Translator: Marharyta Yehorchenko
Simone Bellezza reconstructs the history of the shistdesiatnyky—the generation of Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals (artists, writers, scientists) who spearheaded the renaissance of Ukrainian national culture in the 1960s. Bellezza’s analysis begins with the awakening of artistic and literary expression during the so-called Soviet Thaw and describes the complex relationship…
The Mobilized
Author: Vlad Yakushev
Translator: Fr Jeffrey D. Stephaniuk
Vlad Yakushev has proven the success of his writing not only by the number of book sales in Ukraine, but also by his prescient and patriotic first-hand involvement in the events he describes. He defended Ukraine in the years before Russia’s full-scale war, and he continues to fight since 2022…
Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta
Author: Maik Yohansen
Translator: Uilleam Blacker
Italian doctor Leonardo Pazzi and Alceste, his “future lover,” travel through the picturesque, hilly region of Sloboda, near Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, and experience a series of encounters with local Ukrainians and nature itself, with disappearances and transformations that are filled with paradoxes and unmotivated twists…
Dom’s Dream Kingdom
Author: Victoria Amelina
Translator: Grace Mahoney
Victoria Amelina’s award-wining novel, Dom’s Dream Kingdom, prods the complexities of Ukraine’s transition to independence after the Soviet collapse. Following members of the Tsilyk family, who settle in Lviv in the 1990s, the novel unearths their multigenerational ties from Baku to Berlin, while considering the forgotten lives that once inhabited the family’s new apartment…
La dernière volonté du bourreau
Author: Eugenia Kononenko
Translators: Rostyslav Nyemtsev, Felicia Mihali
Eugenia Kononenko’s book masterfully helps the reader travel through the past. Ivan Ivak, the main character of this novel, is both a former writer in the Soviet Union and a KGB employee who puts people to death. After the collapse of communism, he dies under unexplained circumstances, leaving behind a body of second-rate literary work that no one reads…
Darlings of Justice
Author: Yuri Andrukhovych
Translator: Vitaly Chernetsky
Darlings of Justice is the sixth novel by Yuri Andrukhovych, a leading contemporary Ukrainian author. Subtitled “a parahistorical novel in eight and a half episodes,” the book marked Andrukhovych’s long-awaited return to plot-driven narrative prose from works in a more essayistic mode. The entire novel is closely linked to Ukraine. As a result, it can be read as a powerful meditation on the puzzles and …
Road to Asmara
Author: Serhiy Synhaivsky
Translator: Ksenia Maryniak
In the words of Ukrainian writer, Oksana Zabuzhko: “Road to Asmara is the best book written in Ukrainian in the past decade. This book has a great future not only because it’s well written. It is essentially the first Ukrainian viewpoint on the history of the Soviet Union’s colonial wars in the 20th century. It has yet to reach the wider public, with the exception of the no-nonsense men who were forced into Soviet Army duty, if not in Afghanistan then other military arenas…
In Isolation. Dispatches from Occupied Donbas
Author: Stanislav Aseyev
Translator: Lidia Wolanskyj
In this exceptional collection of dispatches from occupied Donbas, writer and journalist Stanislav Aseyev details the internal and external changes observed in the cities of Makiïvka and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
Ivan and Phoebe
Author: Oksana Lutsyshyna
Translator: Nina Murray
"Ivan and Phoebe" won Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko National Prize for Literature in 2021. The novel chronicles the lives of several young people involved in the Revolution on the Granite in 1990.
Forgottenness
Author: Tanja Maljartschuk
Translator: Zenia Tompkins
Published in Ukraine by Old Lion Publishing in 2016, Tanja Maljartcshuk’s Forgottenness («Забуття») was the winner of the BBC Book of the Year Award. This literary, psychological, and historical novel, written in hauntingly sparse and deliberate prose, chronicles the mental and emotional journey of a young Ukrainian woman searching through her nation’s past for footprints to guide her through the present.
Details of an Hourglass
Author: Mykola Horbal
Translator: Myroslava Stefaniuk
This is a translation of poems and song lyrics written by Mykola Horbal — a poet, musician, and human rights activist, who was repressed by the totalitarian Soviet regime and imprisoned three times in the Gulag for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."
Decommunization in Ukraine
Author: Oleksandr Hrytsenko
Translator: Ksenia Maryniak
Originally published in 2019 by the Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Oleksandr Hrytsenko’s monograph is rich in both primary and secondary sources, providing a broad and comprehensive view of Ukraine’s politics of decommunization in the context of social, political, and cultural transformations in the post-totalitarian and, in some respects, postcolonial country.
Eternal Calendar
Author: Vasyl Makhno
Translator: Ali Kinsella
With narratives that move back and forth from the 17th century to the present, Vasyl Makhno's Eternal Calendar layers local, Ukrainian history onto global histories. Various ethnic groups come together and interact in the delineated space of a small town in what the author calls the "Brownian motion of history."
Voices of Babyn Yar
Author: Marianna Kiyanovska
Translators: Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochynsky
This is a translation of Marianna Kiyanovska’s book of poetry The Voices of Babyn Yar, which was awarded Ukraine’s highest literary state prize in 2020, the Shevchenko National Prize for Literature. Originally published in Kyiv by Dukh i Litera in 2017, the book represents the first stand-alone volume of translations of Kiyanovska’s poetry into the English language.