Earth Gods: Writings from before the War by Taras Prokhasko

Book launch and discussion of Earth Gods with translators Ali Kinsella, Mark Andryczyk, and Uilleam Blacker

Moderated by Oleh Kotsyuba, Director of Print and Digital Publications at HURI

Books will be available to purchase at the event.

About the Author

Taras Prokhasko is a renowned Ukrainian writer, journalist, and essayist. A biologist by training, he writes with a strong sense of empathy with the inanimate world around us, combining elements of magical realism with a meditative outlook. He has been recognized with the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski Literary Award (Poland-Ukraine, 2007), Book of the Year Award (Ukraine, 2011), Yuri Shevelov Prize (Ukraine, 2013), and BBC Ukraine Book of the Year Prize (2019). For his collection of essays Yes, However he was awarded the prestigious National Taras Shevchenko Prize of Ukraine (2020). Prokhasko lives and works in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.

About the Book

Earth Gods: Writings from before the War presents Prokhasko’s early writings: genre-bending Anna’s Other Days, the collection of reflections FM Galicia, and The UnSimple, an iconoclastic novel that offers an alternative history of the Ukrainian Carpathian mountains of the first half of the twentieth century. Collected here for the first time in one volume, these stylistically and conceptually virtuosic texts testify to the richness of contemporary Ukrainian literature and its close connection with Western literary traditions, while also vividly demonstrating its sense of self-sufficiency and confidence in navigating complex cultural constructs and frameworks.

About the Speakers

Ali Kinsella holds an MA in Slavic studies from Columbia University and has been translating from Ukrainian for thirteen years. With co-translator Dzvinia Orlowsky, she was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and granted a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She also coedited Love in Defiance of Pain (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022), an anthology of short fiction to support Ukrainians during the war. She is currently working on translating the works of Halyna Kruk, Myroslav Laiuk, Vasyl Makhno, Sofia Yablonska, and Iryna Vilde.


 

Mark Andryczyk administers the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and teaches Ukrainian literature at its Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He holds a PhD in Ukrainian Literature from the University of Toronto and is the author of The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction. He has published translations of numerous Ukrainian poets and writers, including Volodymyr Rafeyenko, Lyuba Yakimchuk, Yuri Andrukhovych, Marjana Savka, Hrytsko Chubai, Oleh Lysheha, Serhiy Zhadan, and many others. 

 

Uilleam Blacker is Associate Professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture at University College London and a translator of Ukrainian literature. He is the author of Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe. His translations of Ukrainian authors have appeared in The Guardian, White Review, PN Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and others. His translation of Mike Yohansen’s novel Dr Leonardo’s Journey… is forthcoming with HURI. In 2022, he was the Paul Celan Translation Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. Currently - in fall 2025, he is the John S. Saden Visiting Professor at the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

 

This event is organized by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies public event series and in collaboration with HURI Books.

Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access should contact HURI Programs Manager, Megan K. Duncan Smith, at least two weeks in advance of the session.

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