Volodymyr Rafeyenko – an Award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, literary and film critic. Having graduated from the Donetsk University with a degree in Russian philology and culture studies, he wrote and published entirely in Russian. Following the outbreak of the Russian aggression in Ukraine’s east, Rafeyenko left Donetsk and moved to a town near Kyiv where he wrote Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love, his first novel in the Ukrainian language, which was shortlisted for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award in arts and culture. Among other recognitions, he is the winner of the Volodymyr Korolenko Prize for the novel Brief Farewell Book (1999) and the Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award for the novel The Length of Days (2017). His essays recently appeared in English translation in the collection Ukraine22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War. His new play Signals of Being, or Verbum caro factum about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is forthcoming at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Publishing House in 2025.
