Marianna Kiyanovska (born 1973 in Nesterov, today Zhovkva, Oblast Lviv) is working on a trilogy, the first two parts of which deal with current and past war crimes. In The Voices of Babyn Yar (translated into English by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute 2022), she writes from the perspective of victims who were murdered by the German Wehrmacht in a ravine near Kyiv in 1941. A chorus of the dead resounds, voices that detach and reconnect with one another, leaving a lasting impression on the reader. The second volume, Lightning Meets Wind and Water, focuses on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The concluding part, which is still in the works, will address war in general as a phenomenon of a radical threshold.

Oksana Maksymchuk (born 1982 in Lviv) translates Marianna Kiyanovska’s poems into English. As a poet, she has published Xenia and Lovy, two award-winning books in Ukrainian. She is also co-editor of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press 2017), an anthology that gained international recognition. Oksana Maksymchuk’s third volume of poetry, Still City (Carcanet Press 2024), was written in English. In the form of a poem, it is a kind of diary where she reconstructs the moment of the Russian invasion, a breach on civilization that came with a warning, by using various sources (social media, news, witness statements, and the like). She herself suggests: “In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity.”

Marianna Kiyanovska and Oksana Maksymchuk in conversation with Irina Bondas

The event will be interpreted into German from Ukrainian. Kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.

Project Management: Alexander Gumz