| Oksana Zabuzhko (b.1960) is Ukraine’s major contemporary writer, poet, and essayist. She made her poetry debut at the age of 12, yet, as her parents had been blacklisted during the Soviet purges of the 1970s, it was not until the perestroika that her first book was published. She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University, obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts, and has worked as a research associate for the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In the early 1990s she lectured in the USA as a Fulbright Fellow and a Writer-in-Residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and University of Pittsburgh. After the publication of her novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996), which in 2006 was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence”, she has been living as a free-lance author. She has established herself as the country’s leading public intellectual by writing for the press as a columnist, and, recently, as a blogger. Zabuzhko’s books have been translated into Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, English, German, Hungarian, Italian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, and Turkish. Among her numerous acknowledgements are Global Commitment Foundation Poetry Prize (1997), MacArthur Grant (2002), Antonovych International Foundation Prize (2008), the Ukrainian National Award the Order of Princess Olha (2009), and many other national awards. Ms. Zabuzhko lives in Kyiv with her partner, artist Rostyslav Luzhetsky.
|
