“Till we meet in Donetsk”: identity and conflict. Panel discussion

Olena Stiazhkina is a Ukrainian historian, prose writer and political activist. A senior researcher at the History Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, she is the author of Zhinky v istorii ukrains’koi kultury drugoi polovyny XX stolittia [Women in Ukrainian cultural history, second half of the 20^th century] (2003) and Ludyna v radians’kii provintsii: Osvoennia (vid)movy [A person in Soviet province: mastering the discourse (and its rejection)] (2013). Author of ten books of prose, among them books about the current war “Movoiu Boha” ["In God’s language"](2016),"Rozka"(2018). She was born and lived in Donetsk, worked at the Donetsk National University, since September 2014 – a displaced person/refugee, she lives and works in Kyiv. Member of Ukrainian PEN.

Iryna Shuvalova is an award-winning poet, translator and scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine. She authored three poetry collections in Ukrainian, with the fourth forthcoming in 2020. Her translations appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation and Words without Borders among others, and her poetry has been translated into nine languages. She undertook multiple writing residencies, including the Hawthornden fellowship in 2015. She was awarded Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize in 2012. She is currently a PhD student and Gates Cambridge scholar at the University of Cambridge, where she also teaches. Her first book of poetry in English translation 'Pray to the Empty Wells' is due in 2019 with Lost Horse Press. Her academic research centers on the issues of identity and othering in the War in Donbas as seen through the prism of war songs.