Haska Shyyan

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Haska Shyyan became the first Ukrainian writer to receive the European Union Prize for Literature, awarded in Brussels in 2019 for her novel Behind Your Back (2019) – a distinction whose reach shows in the translation rights, sold to publishers in more than ten countries. In 2022, she held a writer-in-residence fellowship at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland.

A body under pressure – desiring, ageing, giving birth – runs through everything Shyyan writes, her key instrument for examining human existence amid the pressures of modern life. Behind Your Back traces how conflict reshapes intimacy, identity, and the expectations placed on women left behind. Her debut, Hunt, Doctor, Hunt! (2014), is a surrealist story following a medical student's observations on life in Ukraine at a moment of upheaval. Her 2025 poetry debut, Transition State, traces fifteen years of personal transformation – pregnancy, motherhood, ageing – largely refracted through recent events, treating conflict as something lived rather than argued. 

She also writes short fiction for magazines and anthologies, translated DBC Pierre's Booker Prize–winning novel Lights Out in Wonderland into Ukrainian, and in 2024 published her first children's book, Padormirs, Slowers and Madame President's Missing Daughter, written as a tribute to time spent reading with her young daughter during lockdown.  

European Stories from Ukraine European Stories from Ukraine 

Ukraine in histories and stories. Essays by Ukrainian intellectuals. Ukraine in histories and stories. Essays by Ukrainian intellectuals. 

Contemporary Ukrainian Prose and Poetry in Vogue Ukraine vol. 1 and 2 Contemporary Ukrainian Prose and Poetry in Vogue Ukraine vol. 1 and 2