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Contributor

Iryna Shuvalova

Portrait of Iryna Shuvalova
Contributor

Iryna Shuvalova

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 TranslationThe White ReviewThe WolfLiterary 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.

Articles by Iryna Shuvalova

An overhead shot of an empty brick elevator shaft
Paul Sableman, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr
vox
By Iryna Shuvalova
I want to speak like a woman who burns a pile of old paper in the street / and the flame dances but you can’t see her face
Translated from Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker
Multilingual
A sunset behind a line of trees
Photo by Niels Weiss on Unsplash
vesper
By Iryna Shuvalova
do you see—the trees have gathered at the gates in the twilight
Translated from Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker
Multilingual
Illuminated highways in Kyiv at night
Photo by Levi Kyiv on Unsplash
a moving grove
By Iryna Shuvalova
In this poem written a year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Iryna Shuvalova proposes an aesthetics of escape.
Translated from Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker
MultimediaMultilingual
Panda
By Sashko Ushkalov
“Looks like you’re a liar. Is that correct?”
Translated from Ukrainian by Iryna Shuvalova
Metamorphoses of Reality: An Introduction to New Ukrainian Writing
By Oleksandr Mykhed
It is through the fantastic that the reader arrives at the everyday.
Translated from Ukrainian by Iryna Shuvalova
Multilingual