Tamara Duda

Photo: Uliana Basova

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Tamara Duda's debut novel, Daughter (2019), has become one of the most internationally awarded Ukrainian novels of recent years. Its German edition won the 2025 Hotlist Prize by public vote at the Frankfurt Book Fair, its Polish edition won Poland's Natalia Gorbanevskaya Award in 2023 and was a finalist for the Angelus Central European Literature Award the same year, and in Ukraine it received the Shevchenko National Prize, the country's highest state honor in culture and the arts.

The novel has been translated into English, German, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, and Polish. Drawing on personal experience, it follows an ordinary woman who becomes an underground volunteer, her identity deliberately left unnamed so readers experience events entirely through her eyes rather than at a remove. A screen adaptation has been in development since the book's release.

Across her fiction, ordinary women are pushed by crisis into radical transformation, and hidden truths – about a country, a marriage, a family – surface under pressure. Her second novel, The Principle of Intervention (2021), is a detective story centered on a widow; her third, Sheptukha (2025), follows a translator drawn back to her late grandmother's remote village home, where old secrets and new danger both surface.

Duda is also a literary translator: her Ukrainian translation of Charlotte Brontë's Villette was the novel's first-ever Ukrainian edition.