Marianna Kiyanovka, author
Moderator: Oleh Kotsyuba, Manager of Publications, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

Hybrid Event
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Book Description

With this collection of stirring poems the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival in their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.

The Voices of Babyn Yar is translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky with an introduction byPolina Barskova. Explore the book

Marianna Kiyanovska is an award-winning Ukrainian writer, translator, literary scholar, and public figure whose works have been translated into eighteen languages. She is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and literary translation. A winner of the Vilenica International Literary Festival and the CEI Fellowship (2007), she was also awarded the Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture in Poland (2013). In 2020, she was recognized with the prestigious Taras Shevchenko Prize for The Voices of Babyn Yar.

For more information: https://huri.harvard.edu/event/kiyanovska-2022.

Co-sponsored by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.