Lyuba Yakimchuk

Photo: Alina Ruda (The Ukrainians)

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In 2022, Lyuba Yakimchuk stood on the Grammy Awards stage and performed her poem Prayer alongside John Legend. Her poetry collection Apricots of Donbas (2015) has been published in ten languages, with its French edition released as an audiobook narrated by Catherine Deneuve, and her poems more broadly have been translated into nearly thirty languages and published in literary journals and anthologies across North America, Europe, and Asia. Her work has been recommended by The New York Times and featured by the BBC, CBC, France 24, and CNN, and Apricots of Donbas has been recognized internationally, including with the Kovalev Foundation's International Poetic Award in New York and a shortlisting for France's Prix Mallarmé.

Yakimchuk's writing moves fluidly across form. She wrote the libretto for the music-theatre work Freedom Letters Freedom Letters (composer Olesia Zdorovetska), lyrics featured on Yuriy Gurzhy's album Ukrainian Songs of Love and Hate and in Maryana Sadovska's project 2014, and the poetic basis for double bassist Mark Tokar's album Apricots of Donbas. She is also a playwright, with Wall and Schrödinger's Cat among her works for the stage, and a screenwriter, having written Slovo House Slovo House. Across genres, her work returns repeatedly to how war fractures language itself – the way ordinary words break apart and are remade under the pressure of loss and displacement.