War inflicts change on people and the literature they need and produce in times of severe existential challenge. Non-fiction genres dominate, but poetry also becomes a form of personal witnessing and documentation of hard experiences, and at the same time a way of speaking and understanding the loss and grief, both personal and collective. This conversation with Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk will focus on new themes and narrative strategies in her recent poetry, on shifting ethical and aesthetic frameworks, and on the poetic text as a form of therapeutic writing. Kruk will read from her latest collections of poems including the award-winning Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails and Lost in Living in English and Ukrainian.
Halyna Kruk is an award-winning poet and prose writer, translator, and scholar from Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of 6 books of poetry, An Adult Woman (2017), Co(an)existence (2013), The Face beyond the Photograph (2005), Footprints on Sand and Journeys in Search of a Home (both 1997), audio book Буквар / BookWar (2023), collection of short stories Anyone but Me (2021), and 4 books for children. Her writings have been translated into more than 25 languages, her latest books of poems A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (Arrowsmith Press, 2023), translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk) and Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024), translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky have appeared in English translation in US. She is a winner of numerous literary awards in Ukraine and abroad, among them Shortlist of Griffin Poetry Prize (2024), The Sundara Ramaswamy Prize, The 2023 Women in Arts Award, The 2022 Kovaliv Fund Prize, The Best Book Award of BookForum 2021 among the others. Kruk is a member of PEN Ukraine. She holds a PhD in Ukrainian baroque literature (2001). She lives in Lviv and teaches European and Ukrainian baroque literature at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv.
This event is co-sponsored by Razom for Ukraine.
