What is the role of poetry at the time of an unjust and horrific war that Russians have inflicted on Ukraine since 2014?New poetry from Ukraine appears as a form of personal witnessing and documentation of war experiences, a way of speaking about trauma and understanding the loss and grief, both personal and collective. This conversation with the award-winning 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 healing. Kruk will read from her latest collections of poems including the award-winning Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails and her most recent Lost in Living in English and Ukrainian. Kruk’s poetry translator Ali Kinsella will also join in the reading and the discussion.
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), The Face beyond the Photograph (2005), Co(an)existence (2013), 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 children’s books. Her latest book of poems A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (Arrowsmith Press, 2023), translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk), was shortlisted for a prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize (2024). Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024), translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, is the most recent poetry collection in English translation. Kruk’s poetry won numerous literary awards in Ukraine and abroad, including The Sundara Ramaswamy Prize, The 2023 Women in Arts Award, The 2022 Kovaliv Fund Prize, The Best Book Award of BookForum 2021. Kruk is a member of the 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.
Ali Kinsella holds an MA in Slavic studies from Columbia University and has been translating from Ukrainian for twelve years. She won the 2019 Kovaliv Fund Prize for her translation of Taras Prokhasko’s novella, Anna’s Other Days, forthcoming from Harvard URI Press. In 2021, she was awarded a Peterson Literary Fund grant to translate Vasyl Makhno’s Eternal Calendar. She co-edited Love in Defiance of Pain (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022), an anthology of short fiction to support Ukrainians during the war. Her other published translations include pieces by Stanislav Aseyev, Lyubko Deresh, Kateryna Kalytko, Myroslav Laiuk, Bohdana Matiiash, Olena Stiazhkina among others.