Vira Kuryko

Photo: Valya Polishchuk

To view the full-size version, click here here

Vira Kuryko has spent over a decade investigating Ukraine's difficult past and present as a reporter, then turned the same instinct for uncovering hidden truths into fiction. "I'm a journalist who works with reality," she has said, "but I live in an invented world, where I can hide" – a doubled vision that runs through her work in both directions: her nonfiction excavates real, obscured histories, while her fiction uses invention to approach truths too painful to state directly.

Her debut book, The Street of Those Involved (2020), reconstructs the Soviet-era persecution of dissident Levko Lukianenko – later a signatory of Ukraine's Declaration of Independence – by his own neighbors in Chernihiv, and won Ukraine's LitAckent Prize. She followed it with Mazepa: Rights to the Sabre (2021), a history of the Cossack hetman, and a graphic novel, Murder on the Stairs (2025), which follows Stepan Bandera's final years. Her debut novel, Letytsia Kuriata and All Her Imaginary Lovers Whom She Lied to About Her Father (2025), follows a narrator who invents seven increasingly fantastical stories about her missing father to explain her own loneliness – a portrait of storytelling as both wound and survival. 

As a reporter, she has covered her native Chernihiv extensively, including from inside the besieged city during the first weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion, work that won the Honor of the Profession Award, one of Ukraine's leading journalism prizes, in both 2022 and 2026, and the 2019 Samovydets feature-writing contest. She also co-wrote a chapter in Visual Stories from Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine (2025), an EU Creative Europe-funded graphic anthology on women's experience of war across the three countries, which debuted at the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair.