Ostap Slyvynskyi

Україна

Ostap Slyvynsky is a Ukrainian poet, translator, essayist, and scholar. He authored five books of poetry: Sacrifice of Big Fish (1998), The Midday Line (2004), Ball in Darkness (2008), Adam (2012), The Winter King (2018), as well as The Dictionary of War (2023), a documentary book based on a testimony of participants and witnesses of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. His books have been published in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Macedonia. He is also known for translating the works by Derek Walcott, William Carlos Williams, Charles Simic, Czesław Miłosz, Olga Tokarczuk, Georgi Gospodinov, and many others. He was the editor of the bilingual Ukrainian-Bulgarian anthology Ukrainian Poetic Avant-Garde (2018), the anthology of contemporary essays The Ark Named Titanic. 20 essays about humanity of AD 2020 (2020) and the anthology of modern Ukrainian poetry Between the Sirens. New poems of war (2023). Ostap Slyvynsky initiated and/or participated in several human rights actions and campaigns in Ukraine, including public actions in support of Oleg Sentsov (2018–2019) and Solidarity Words, a campaign in support of Crimean Tatar journalists illegally imprisoned in the occupied Crimea and Russian Federation (since 2021). In 2015, he collaborated with Ukrainian composer Bohdan Sehin on a media performance, Preparation, dedicated to civilian victims of war in the East of Ukraine. Ostap Slyvynsky was the first program director of the International Literary Festival in Lviv in 2006–2007. In 2016–2018, he organized the public discussion platform Stories of Otherness (the series of public interviews with writers, intellectualists and civic activists who suffered from different kinds of social exclusion). Since 2021, he organizes PEN Ukraine’s festival Propysy (The Writings) aimed at novice authors. He was elected the Vice President of PEN Ukraine in 2022.