Ostap Slyvynsky will present poetry and prose from the recently published, award-winning The Winter King (Lost Horse Press, 2023), translated by Vitaly Chernetsky and Iryna Shuvalova and the forthcoming A Ukrainian Dictionary of War (Lost Horse Press), translated by Grace Mahoney and Taras Malkovych. Mr. Slyvynsky will discuss his work today as a writer, scholar, and Vice President of PEN Ukraine.
Ostap Slyvynsky is a Ukrainian poet, translator, essayist, and scholar. He authored five books of poetry: Sacrifice of Big Fish (1998), The Midday Line (2004), Ball in Darkness (2008), Adam (2012), The Winter King (2018), as well as The Dictionary of War (2023), a documentary book based on a testimony of participants and witnesses of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. His books have been published in the USA (The Winter King, Lost Horse Press 2023), Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Macedonia. He is also known for translating the works by Derek Walcott, William Carlos Williams, Charles Simic, Czesław Miłosz, Olga Tokarczuk, Georgi Gospodinov, and many others.
Ostap Slyvynsky is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philology, Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv). In 2007, he earned a PhD degree in Humanities (with thesis on the silence in contemporary Bulgarian prose). The main areas of his research interests are intercultural communication, the comparative history of Slavic literatures of Central and Eastern Europe, and translation studies. He was the editor of the bilingual Ukrainian-Bulgarian anthology Ukrainian Poetic Avant-Garde (2018), the anthology of contemporary essays The Ark Named Titanic. 20 essays about humanity of AD 2020 (2020) and the anthology of modern Ukrainian poetry Among Sirens. New poems of war (2023). Since 2021, he organizes PEN Ukraine’s festival Propysy (The Writings) aimed at novice authors. He was elected the Vice President of PEN Ukraine in 2022.