Serhiy Zhadan: Ukraine’s enfant terrible. A talk with the author
Date and time:
Monday 12 November, 2018
19:00 - 20:15
Location:
Knowledge Centre Theatre, British Library
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB
An evening with one of Ukraine's most iconic contemporary writers: poet, leftwing intellectual and ska band frontman Serhiy Zhadan. Chaired by Eastern Europe specialist Uilleam Blacker of UCL. Serhiy Zhadan is the most popular poet of the post-independence generation in Ukraine, where his readings fill large auditoriums. His work speaks to the disillusionment, difficulties and ironies that the collapse of the Soviet Union has brought. Originally the enfant terrible of Ukrainian letters, Serhiy Zhadan is considered the most important poet of the decade and even one of the leading voices of the last century.
This event will be held in Ukrainian with a live interpreter, and can therefore be enjoyed by both Ukrainian and English speakers.
Held in partnership with the British Library.
£10 standard / £7 concessions
Speaker
Serhiy Zhadan
Serhiy Zhadan was born in 1974 in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, an area of the country rarely viewed as Ukrainian-speaking. Zhadan graduated from the Kharkiv Teacher’s College with a thesis on the work of Mykhail Semenko and the Ukrainian Futurist writers of the 1920s. He currently lives in Kharkiv and writes poetry, prose and essays and also translates from German, Belarusian and Russian. He has also written several theatre pieces that have been staged in Kharkiv and at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York. He is considered the most important poet of the decade and even one of the leading voices of the last century. His work has been translated into Armenian, Belarusian, Croatian, Czech, English, German, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian and Slovenian.
Moderator
Uilleam Blacker
Uilleam Blacker is Lecturer in Comparative East European Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His research focuses on Ukrainian, Polish and Russian culture and cultural memory. He is co-author of Remembering Katyn (2012) and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (2013). His translations of contemporary Ukrainian authors have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders and Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction series.
