«Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, I arrived in Oslo after completing my PhD in the UK and living for three years in China. My academic background is in Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Translation Studies. I studied Philosophy at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and earned my first Master's there, examining the language of poetry through phenomenology and hermeneutics.
In 2014, I completed my MA in Comparative Literature in the US as a Fulbright scholar at Dartmouth College. My PhD project, meanwhile, was an interdisciplinary undertaking examining the Russo-Ukrainian war through popular music. I completed it in 2020 at the University of Cambridge where I was a Gates Cambridge scholar at St John's College. Following that, from 2019 to 2023, I lived and worked in the Yangtze River Delta region of China, in the historical cities of Hangzhou and Nanjing.
In my research work, I am particularly interested in how political imaginaries are produced through culture in the context of Russia's war in Ukraine. My project at ILOS examines how the symbolic space of Russianness is being manufactured through culture in Russia- occupied territories of Ukraine.
In addition to my academic work, for the past decade and a half, I have been actively engaged with Ukraine's literary scene. Since 2011 when my first poetry collection 'Ran' came out, I have published five books of poetry, with the sixth one, endsongs (kinechni pisni), scheduled to appear in the spring of 2024. In 2009, I also co-edited the first anthology of queer literature in Ukraine, ironically titled 120 pages of 'Sodom'. My work has been translated into 25 languages and published internationally, including in Literary Hub, Modern Poetry in Translation, The White Review, Words Without Borders, and others. I am particularly delighted to have my poetry available in Norwegian, with a book-length publication in Norway currently in the works.
In my free time, I like taking long walks, translating poetry (Alice Oswald is one of my favourites), listening to old music (from Monteverdi to The Velvet Underground), and conducting arcane and fruitless negotiations with my two cats, Xiao Hu and Xiao Yun.»