Iryna Shuvalova is a poet and scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine, based in Nanjing, China. She is the author of five award-winning books of poetry, including Pray to the Empty Wells, available in English (Lost Horse Press, 2019). Her most recent and fifth book of poetry, Stoneorchardwoods (2020), has been named book of the year by Ukraine’s LitAktsent Prize for Literature and received the Special Prize of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Book Award. In 2009, she co-edited 120 Pages of “Sodom,” the first anthology of queer writing in Ukraine. Her poetry has been translated into twenty-five languages and published internationally, including in Ambit, Modern Poetry in Translation, The White Review, The Wolf, Literary Hub, and others. Her forthcoming academic monograph “Donbas Is My Sparta”: Identity and Belonging in the Songs of the Russo-Ukrainian War explores the impact of the war on Ukrainian society. She holds a PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar, and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she was a Fulbright scholar. In the summer of 2023, she is to take up a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Oslo, Norway.