Oleh Kryshtopa
Based in Kyiv, Ukraine
Oleh Kryshtopa's work has reached readers beyond Ukraine's borders and earned the country's highest literary honour. For Radio Aphrodite (2025), a documentary novel about an underground radio station run by the Ukrainian resistance during the Second World War, he received the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine in 2026. His travelogue Ukraine: Scale 1:1 (2013) was published in a full Czech edition (Dokořán, 2016), and his fiction has appeared in German translation in the Austrian literary journal Literatur und Kritik – a story in 2025 and his novella Love, Sex and Death – Guaranteed (2006) in 2026.
He is the author of eleven books and co-author of four others. Moving between literary reportage, documentary non-fiction, and fiction, he explores how individual lives open onto larger historical processes – deportation and displaced communities, the buried investigations of nineteenth-century Ukrainian national awakening, the underground resistance networks of the Second World War, and love and coming of age set against political upheaval. He has also written the screenplays for dozens of documentary films. Since 2014 he has created and hosted the television series Time Machine, and in 2021 he launched the YouTube channel History for Adults, now among Ukraine's most-watched history channels.

