Volodymyr Rafeyenko

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Volodymyr Rafeyenko is one of the contemporary Ukrainian novelists to have multiple books published or under contract with Harvard University Press: Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (Мондеґрін. Пісні про смерть і любов) and Signals of Being (Мобільні хвилі буття, або Verbum caro factum es) are both already published in English, with Petrichor: The Scent of the Earth After Rain (Петрикор – запах землі після дощу), translated and introduced by Mark Andryczyk, due in 2026. His novel The Length of Days (Долгота дней) won Czechia's Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award in 2017. Serhiy Zhadan called it exceptionally important, writing that in it "the atmosphere of hell shows through reality," and Yuri Andrukhovych named it the best Ukrainian novel of its time.

Rafeyenko turns to myth and phantasmagoria in fiction that treats identity as something revealed only in crisis rather than fixed in advance – "not a closed process," in his words, but something tested at the moment someone insists on telling you who you are. Mondegreen (2019) follows a displaced professor surrounded by "mondegreens" – misheard, half-understood words — as he rebuilds a life and a language in a new city. The Length of Days (2017) is set in a fictionalized version of his home city, reshaped by upheaval. His play Signals of Being (2023) works through that same period of personal disruption through literature.