THE NEW UKRAINIAN NOVEL
7 Stories Up at SNFL
Join some of Ukraine's most prolific and distinguished writers - Olena Stiazhkina, Oksana Lutsyshyna and Andrey Kurkov - at the NYPL’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library for this evening celebrating the rich literary culture of Ukraine. The authors will discuss their latest works, which illuminate Ukraine's diverse society and deal with the legacy of Soviet and Post-Soviet rule, as well as the present situation in the country.
This event will take place in person at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on the 7th Floor.
To join the event in-person | Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program.
Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received “hundreds of rejections” and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kyiv, was published in 2014, followed by the novel The Bickford Fuse (MacLehose Press, 2016). His novel Grey Bees, translated by Boris Dralyuk, was published by Deep Vellum in 2022. Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, his 2012 novel, has been long-listed for the Booker International Prize this year and will be forthcoming in the US in 2024. He lives in Kyiv with his British wife and their three children.
Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian writer, translator, and poet, author of three novels, a collection of short stories, and five books of poetry, the latest of them published in English translation in 2019 (Persephone Blues, Arrowsmith). For her latest novel, Ivan and Phoebe, she was awarded the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize (2020) and the Taras Shevchenko National Award in fiction (2021). Ivan and Phoebe was published by Deep Vellum in English translation in 2023. Lutsyshyna holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches the Ukrainian language and Eastern European literatures in translation.
A historian by training, Olena Stiazhkina is a prolific Ukrainian writer and journalist with numerous scholarly publications and eleven books of fiction. Until the occupation of the city of Donetsk, she taught Slavic history at the Vasyl Stus National University in Donetsk (1993–2015) and then at the Mariupol State University (2015–2016). Her scholarly interests focus on women's history, life in the Soviet Union, and the history of the Donbas. Since 2016, she has served as the senior research fellow at the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Her works of fiction comprise collections of short stories, novels, and detective stories (under the pen name Olena Iurska). Having written almost exclusively in Russian before, Stiazhkina has been transitioning to writing in Ukrainian following the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Her most recent scholarly book is The Stigma of Occupation: Self-Perception of Soviet Women in the 1940s (in Ukrainian, 2019). Her most recent book of fiction is Cecil the Lion Had to Die (in Ukrainian; English translation forthcoming from Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2023).