Solomea: Star of Opera’s Golden Age
(Соломія: Зірка Золотої доби опери)
Author: Andriy Semotiuk
Translators: Halyna Stashkiw
Translation: English to Ukrainian
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, is the most authoritative biographical work on Krushelnytska and, with this translation, her life story will be available to the Ukrainian-speaking world.
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The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural Study of the Shistdesiatnyky (Берег чекань: культурологічне дослідження шістдесятників)
Author: Simone Attilio Bellezza
Translator: Marharyta Yehorchenko
Translation: English to Ukrainian
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 that this young cultural elite had with the Soviet authorities until the mass arrests and repressions of intellectuals in January 1972. The Shore of Expectations was awarded the 2020 Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies.
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The Mobilized (Мобілізяка)
Author: Vlad Yakushev
Translator: Fr Jeffrey D. Stephaniuk
Translation: Ukrainian to English
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. His work is important for its public record of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion and for the accessibility of its content: as a citizen soldier, Yakushev knows how to frame the war in prose relatable to both civilians and the soldiers about whom he writes. In Mobiliziaka (The Mobilized), the author describes his direct involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian war and answers many questions on the experiences of war not dealt with in his previous works.
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Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta (Подорож ученого доктора Леонардо і його майбутньої коханки прекрасної Альчести у Слобожанську Швайцарію)
Author: Maik Yohansen
Translator: Uilleam Blacker
Translation: Ukrainian to English
Italian doctor Leonardo Pazzi and Alcesta, 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. This contemporary English translation of Maik Yohansen’s novel is ideal for readers interested in discovering the richness of Ukrainian modernism. In 1937, in a wave of Stalinist purges of Ukraine’s intelligentsia, the author was executed at age 42 in the NKVD’s Lukyanivka Prison in Kyiv. Yohansen’s book was added to PEN-Ukraine’s list of 100 Notable Books.
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Dom’s Dream Kingdom (Дім для Дома)
Author: Victoria Amelina
Translator: Grace Mahoney
Translation: Ukrainian to English
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. The result is an incisive challenge to the barriers facing Ukraine’s collective memory. Amelina won the Joseph Conrad Literary Award in 2021 and her book was shortlisted for several awards including the European Union Prize for Literature. The author and war-crimes researcher died tragically at age 37 in July 2023 after a Russian missile struck a popular restaurant in the city of Kramatorsk, killing and wounding over 60 people.
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La dernière volonté du bourreau (Останнє бажання)
Author: Eugenia Kononenko
Translators: Rostyslav Nyemtsev, Felicia Mihali
Translation: Ukrainian to French
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. Years later, his children come across а manuscript that reveals the other side of their father. Before his death, their father committed his only act of courage and literary honesty by revealing the truth about his past and changing the lives of future generations.
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Darlings of Justice (Коханці юстиції)
Author: Yuri Andrukhovych
Translator: Vitaly Chernetsky
Translation: Ukrainian to English
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 paradoxes of Ukrainian history, the eternal return of a certain set of complexes and traumas experienced by different generations of Ukrainians, and an exploration of their hopes, dreams, and daring feats. Darlings of Justice won the prestigious “BBC Book of the Year” award in 2018.
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2021, Translation-in-Progress Grant Recipient
Road to Asmara
«Дорога на Асмару»
Author: Serhiy Synhaivsky
Translator: Ksenia Maryniak
About the project: 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 […] where our boys got sent as cannon fodder in those ‘glorious’ times. And this is precisely the contribution that Ukrainian literature is called upon to make in the world. European journalists I know, who’ve heard there’s a Ukrainian novel written about the 1984–86 famine in Ethiopia, have asked me when the English translation is coming out so that they can read it.”
In the words of a recent review by Ihor Siundiukov: “As with any true and personal story that takes place during a period of transition, the many issues raised by this novel are still relevant today. Some of them are unfamiliar, if not unprecedented, in Ukrainian literature: Soviet racism, the price of independence and personal freedom, individual responsibility and commanding officers’ responsibility, and whether love has any chance at all in this world…”
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2021, Translation-in-Progress Grant Recipient
In Isolation. Dispatches from Occupied Donbas
«В Ізоляції. Дописи про Донбас »
Author: Stanislav Aseyev
Translator: Lidia Wolanskyj
About the project: 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. Aseyev scrutinizes his immediate environment and questions himself in an attempt to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the working-class residents of the industrial region of Donbas.
Aseyev’s documentary prose takes place during the 2015-2017 years of Russia’s military aggression in eastern Ukraine. The author’s testimony ends with his arrest for publishing his dispatches and his subsequent imprisonment and torture in a modern-day concentration camp on the outskirts of Donetsk run by lawless mercenaries and local militants with the tacit approval and support of Moscow. For the first time, an inside account is presented here of the toll on real human lives and civic freedoms that the citizens of Europe’s largest country continue to suffer in Russia’s hybrid war on its territory.
Stanislav Aseyev received the 2021 Shevchenko National Prize for Journalism for this book — Ukraine’s highest recognition in culture and the arts.
The book is expected to be published by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University in 2022.
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2021, Translation-in-Progress Grant Recipient
Ivan and Phoebe
«Іван і Феба»
Author: Oksana Lutsyshyna
Translator: Nina Murray
About the project: “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. The story is set in Uzhgorod, Kyiv and Lviv. As the characters come to exercise their rights to free speech and protest, something that their upbringing absolutely had not prepared them to do, they must also re-evaluate the norms of marriage, family, and home life. While these initially appear to be spaces of peace and harmony, they are soon revealed to be hot beds of conflict and multigenerational trauma.
“Ivan and Phoebe” is an epic novel (projected 120,000 in English) with a solid historical foundation. The translation requires intense engagement not only with the narrative voice, but also with unique and dialectical speech of many characters and historical facts.
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