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In her new collection of stirring poems, the award-winning Ukrainian poet Marianna Kiyanovksa honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival in their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.
Marianna Kiyanovska is an award-winning Ukrainian writer, translator, literary scholar, and public figure whose works have been translated into eighteen languages. She is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and literary translation. A winner of the Vilenica International Literary Festival and the CEI Fellowship (2007), she was also awarded the Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture in Poland (2013). In 2020, she was recognized with the prestigious Taras Shevchenko National Prize in Literature for The Voices of Babyn Yar. She is the Laureate of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Prize and was named the European Poet of Freedom (both in 2022). The English-language translation of The Voices of Babyn Yar has won the 2022 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work from the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the 2021–22 Translation Prize from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS). This book was also shortlisted for the 2023 Best Literary Translation into English Prize from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages (AATSEEL).
This event is co-sponsored by Razom for Ukraine.
Photo credits: Adriana Dovha
