Ukrainian Poetry at War: A Conversation and Reading with Lyuba Yakimchuk

Ukraine Seminar

Lyuba Yakimchuk, Poet, Playwright, and Screenwriter
Introduction: Jemma Paek, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Moderator: Bohdan Tokarskyi, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures (Ukrainian Literature and Culture), Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

This event will feature a reading and conversation with Lyuba Yakimchuk, an award-winning Ukrainian poet, screenwriter, and playwright. Yakimchuk’s widely acclaimed collection Apricots of Donbas was among the first to process and articulate Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine when it broke out in 2014 and forced her family to flee their home in Eastern Ukraine.

Yakimchuk will read both from her most recent work and from Apricots of Donbas. She will reflect on how the events of 2014 foreshadowed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. She will speak about the power and vulnerability of the poetic language at times of war. She will also discuss the ways in which her own writing draws inspiration from Ukrainian literary tradition, particularly such unlikely sources as futurism and the Baroque. Poems will be read in the original and in translation.

Lyuba Yakimchuk is an award-winning poet, playwright, and screenwriter born in 1985 in Pervomaisk, Luhansk region. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Apricots of Donbas (2015; published in English translation in 2021 by Lost Horse Press). Most recently, the French translation of this book has been shortlisted for the 2024 prestigious Prix Mallarmé étranger Prize. She is also the celebrated author of two plays and two film scripts, including the documentary film The Slovo House (2017) about the Ukrainian modernist artists arrested and killed during the Stalinist purges. Yakimchuk performed her poetry at the 2022 Grammy Awards. Her writing has won numerous awards, been translated into more than twenty languages and covered by The New York Times, BBC, CBC, and CNN.

Jemma Paek is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, with research interests in Ukrainian literature, queer post-Soviet cinema, and Eastern Orthodox icon painting traditions.

Bohdan Tokarskyi is Assistant Professor of Ukrainian Literature and Culture at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He is a scholar of Ukraine’s modern and contemporary literature with particular interest in dissident writing, modern poetry, and comparative literature.

This event is organized by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

Any questions can be directed to slavic@fas.harvard.edu