Andriy Lyubka

Photo: Yurii Yatskulych

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Andriy Lyubka's work has been translated into twenty languages, and his career carries a distinct mark of Polish recognition: in 2024 he won the Polish Institute in Kyiv's Joseph Conrad Literary Award for his career as a whole, and in 2026 the Poland–Lithuania Cooperation and Dialogue Forum and the Jerzy Giedroyc Forum jointly honoured him for his contribution to literary dialogue across Central and Eastern Europe. He has held writing residencies from Latvia to Croatia and curated two international poetry festivals in Ukraine.

His fiction works in a tradition of sharp absurdist satire, training a wry eye on bureaucratic dysfunction and on the borderlands where Ukraine meets the Balkans – a region he argues his native Transcarpathia has always culturally belonged to, an idea explored in his travel book In Search of Barbarians (2019). His debut novel, Carbide (2015), imagines a provincial teacher who tries to dig a tunnel to smuggle the entire country into the European Union, and was later staged by Kyiv's Wild Theatre. His 2025 spy novel, An Evening in Istanbul, turns to a different kind of border-crossing, following a Ukrainian writer in Istanbul for a book presentation who is recruited by Ukraine's security service for a small, complicating favour. As a translator from Polish, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, he has brought Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić, Miljenko Jergović, and Dubravka Ugrešić to Ukrainian readers, alongside his long-running work on the Polish poet Bohdan Zadura.

Lyubka remains a prolific columnist and commentator on Central European affairs, work that runs alongside – and regularly informs – his fiction and essays.