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Documenting Atrocity in Poetry: a conversation with Oksana Maksymchuk
28 October 2024, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm
A SSEES Rethinking Eastern Europe and Eurasia seminar co-organised with the Ukrainian Institute London
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
SSEES
Location
-
Masaryk roomUCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies16 Taviton streetLondonWC1H 0BW
How can poetry respond to war? This is a question that is as old as poetry and as old as war, but it is one that we still must confront with each new conflict. Oksana Maksymchuk, a leading Ukrainian poet, tackles this problem in her new collection, Still City (Carcanet, 2024), which chronicles the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the point of view of a civilian in a Ukrainian city; Oksana has also worked extensively translating and anthologising Ukrainian war poetry since Russia began its aggression against Ukraine in 2014. The event will combine readings of Oksana’s latest poems with conversation around questions of witnessing and documenting war through poetry. Oksana Maksymchuk will be in conversation with UCL SSEES’s Uilleam Blacker. For more information on Oksana’s new book see here: https://www.oksanamaksymchuk.com/press
The event is co-organised with the Ukrainian Institute London.
About the Speaker
Oksana Maksymchuk
is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City: Diary of the Invasion came out with Carcanet Press in May 2024. She is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia and Lovy, in the Ukrainian. Oksana’s poems appeared in The Guardian, The Irish Times, The London Magazine, The Paris Review, PN Review, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She co-edited an anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, and co-translated several poetry collections. Oksana is a recipient of the National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, and other honors. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. In recent years, Oksana has been dividing her time between her home in Lviv, the United States, and Europe.