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We’re delighted to announce the winner of this year’s Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize, Daisy Gibbons, for her translation of extracts from Artem Chekh’s wartime diaries and Olha Matsiupa’s play Pilates Time.
“I’m so pleased that my translations are liked enough to have won an award. But what would please me more is to see additional literature by Ukrainian female playwrights, by Chekh and frontline soldiers, making it into English print soon. So much of our knowledge about Ukraine is informed by work by foreigners about Ukraine, or by Ukrainians for a foreign audience.
If we want to speak with Ukrainians on their own terms, we should read work originally written for Ukrainians, which can let us read through Ukrainian eyes (if with English-translation glasses). Thank you to the Ukrainian Institute London for helping us do this, by way of this very necessary prize.”
Daisy Gibbons
Winner, UIL Translation Prize
This year’s theme – prose and poetry about Russia’s war against Ukraine – attracted a wide number of submissions, and we were impressed with the quality of the translations. Two of this year’s jury members shared their impressions of the submissions they read.
“It was an honour to read this year’s UIL translation prize entries; making a decision was very difficult. We were struck by the diversity of voices presented, from renowned writers to completely unknown voices, men and women of all ages from all parts of Ukraine; we read work by first-time and experienced translators. We were also impressed by the range of genres presented, from poetry and drama to prose and non-fiction. The entries truly conveyed the diversity and complexity of the experience of war: we read works filled with patriotism, optimism and heroism, but also those marked by sorrow, doubt, confusion and grief; often all of these things could co-exist in one text. It is more crucial than ever to convey these complexities to non-Ukrainian audiences, so that the Ukrainian experience of the war remains fresh in the minds of supporters abroad. The UIL Translation Prize, by facilitating and publishing these translations, is, thus, playing a crucial cultural diplomatic role.
The winning texts, translated by Daisy Gibbons, represent two of Ukraine’s finest contemporary literary voices. Artem Chekh’s diaries of his army service are clear-eyed, ironic and sceptical, yet also deeply emotionally involved: Daisy has conveyed their tonal complexity superbly, but also expertly makes the strange realia of the trenches comprehensible to her English-language reader. Olha Matsiupa’s play is a strange, experimental, oblique look at the war whose suggestiveness and ambiguities present a real challenge – but, again, Daisy has trodden the line between clarity and openness of interpretation with great sensitivity.”
Uilleam Blacker
Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize Judge
“The prize has proven a powerful draw for Ukrainian writers and translators. The diversity, quality, and wide geography of this year’s submissions testifies to the incredible energy of Ukrainian writing and translation. I feel privileged to have read every entry.”
Nina Murray
Daisy Gibbons’ translation of Pilates Time was made thanks to the program of the Ukrainian Institute Transmission.UA: drama on the move with the support of the British Council in Ukraine and in cooperation with the Royal Theater Court and Birkbeck Center for Contemporary Theatre.
The winning submissions and translations shortlisted by the jury can be read in the London Ukrainian Review.
Sasha Dugdale has published five collections of poems with Carcanet, most recently Deformations in 2020 which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and in 2017 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize for Poetry. She is former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and poet-in-residence at St John’s College, Cambridge (2018-2020). (Photo by Zima Zima).
Halyna Hryn is an author, translator, editor and researcher. She is the editor of Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet Context (Harvard University Press, 2009), translator of the novels Peltse and Pentameron (Northwestern University Press, 1996) by Volodymyr Dibrova and Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (AmazonCrossing, 2011) and Your Logo Could Be Here: Stories (AmazonCrossing, 2020) by Oksana Zabuzhko. She is editor of the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto.
Uilleam Blacker is a lecturer in comparative East European culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His areas of research interest are the literatures and cultures of Ukraine and Poland and cultural memory in eastern Europe. His monograph Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East-Central Europe was published by Routledge in 2019. He is co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012) and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). He has published widely on Ukrainian, Polish and Russian literature and culture. He has translated the work of several contemporary Ukrainian writers, including, most recently, Oleg Sentsov’s short story collection Life Went On Anyway (Deep Vellum, 2019). He is a member of the jury for the International Booker Prize 2023.
Nina Murray was born and raised in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv. She holds advanced degrees in linguistics and creative writing. She is the author of the poetry collection Alcestis in the Underworld (Circling Rivers Press, 2019) as well as chapbooks Minimize Considered (Finishing Line Press, 2018), Minor Heresies (Heartland Review Press, 2020), and Damascus Electric (Pen & Anvil Press, 2020). Her translations from Ukrainian include Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets, and Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe (forthcoming from Deep Vellum). Nina is the winner of the Ukrainian Institute London’s Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize 2021. You can read her winning translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra here.
