Documenting Atrocity in Poetry: a conversation with Oksana Maksymchuk
Date and time:
Monday 28 October, 2024
18:00 - 20:00
Location:
Masaryk Room, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
16 Taviton Street
London
WC1H 0BW
A SSEES Rethinking Eastern Europe and Eurasia seminar co-organised with the Ukrainian Institute London
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 UCL SSEES.
Speaker
Oksana Maksymchuk
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.
Moderator
Uilleam Blacker
Uilleam Blacker is Associate Professor of Ukrainian and East European culture at University College London and a translator of Ukrainian literature. He has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Times Literary Supplement, among others. His translations have appeared in The Guardian, Modern Poetry in Translation and in numerous anthologies. In 2022, he was Paul Celan Translation Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna; in 2023, he was a jury member for the International Booker Prize. He has published translations of Iryna Shuvalova’s poetry in The White Review, Words Without Borders, and Nelle.
