Oksana Zabuzhko (b.1960) is Ukraine’s major contemporary writer, the author of more than twenty books of different genres (poetry, fiction, essays, criticism). 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. Ms. Zabuzhko has established herself as the country’s leading public intellectual, and has for years been listed by the media among Ukraine’s top 100 most influential people. Since 2013 she, along with her partner, artist Rostyslav Luzhetsky, have operated a small publishing house promoting quality non-commercial literature.
Zabuzhko’s books have been translated into Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish. Among her numerous acknowledgements are MacArthur Grant (2002), Antonovych International Foundation Prize (2008), the Ukrainian National Award the Order of Princess Olha (2009), Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine (2019), and many other national and international awards. Her opus magnum, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2010), won Angelus Central European Literary Prize (2013) for the best novel of Eastern and Central Europe, and her recent collection of stories Your Ad Could Go Here (2017) was listed by the New York Times among 100 best books of 2020 from around the world.