Ukraine Writes Back: Writers, Poets and the War
A powerful webinar series spotlighting Ukrainian voices in a time of war
Episode 1: “Names on the Maps”
📅 Thursday 8 May, 5:00pm (AEST)
🔗 Registration link: https://unimelb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_L_da2EnJRGKTFtnGFOFn-A#/registration
Join award-winning poets Oksana Lutsyshyna & Oksana Maksymchuk as they share their work and discuss literature, war, and identity with Professor and Melbourne community member Marko Pavlyshyn for the first webinar episode. Chaired by Assoc Professor Julie Fedor.
In the course of the conversation they will reflect on the impact of the war on their literary work, the wartime role of Ukrainian literature in translation, the challenges of creating Ukrainian literature outside Ukraine and other questions that arise for Ukrainian poets and writers as they respond to russia’s war on Ukraine.
Co-hosted by the Arts Faculty Research Initiative on Post-Soviet Space (RIPSS) at the University of Melbourne and the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (USAANZ).
Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian writer, translator and poet, author of three novels, a collection of short stories and five books of poetry, the latest published in English translation in 2019 (Persephone Blues, Arrowsmith). For her latest novel, Ivan and Phoebe, now published in English by Deep Vellum Publishing, she was awarded the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize (2020) and the Taras Shevchenko National Award in Fiction (2021). She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is currently an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches the Ukrainian language and Eastern European literatures in translation.
Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still Cityis the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection, published by University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). She is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia (Piramida, 2005) and Lovy (Smoloskyp, 2008), both in Ukrainian. She co-edited the anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine(Academic Studies Press, 2017) and has co-translated several poetry collections, most recently Alex Averbuch’s Furious Harvests(Harvard University Press, 2025). She is a recipient of the National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship (2019), the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern language Association (2024) and other honours. Oksana Maksymchuk holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University.
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