Ukrainian New Drama book launch

Natalka Vorozhbyt is a playwright, screenwriter, and director. Her early play, Galka Motalko was awarded the Eureka Prize in 2003 and her play The Grain Store, the first major play about Holodomor, was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2009. She is the co-founder of the Theatre of the Displaced in Kyiv and curator of Ukraine’s ‘Class Act: East-West’ project which ran from 2016-18. Her 2017 play Bad Roads first produced by the Royal Court was later adapted into a film directed by the author and was chosen as Ukraine’s official Oscar selection in 2022. Other screenwriting credits include Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die (2017) and the screen adaptation of Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad entitled The Wild Fields (2018).

Molly Flynn is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Witness onstage: Documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia (Manchester University Press, 2020). Her most recent research analyzes socially engaged theatre practice in Ukraine since 2014. Her writing has been published in journals such as TDR (The Drama Review), New Theatre Quarterly, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Problems of Post-Communism, Open Democracy, and Calvert Journal. Alongside her work as a teacher and a researcher, Molly is also a producer and theatre-maker and a co-founder of the US-based theatre collective the NY Neo-Futurists.