Natalka Sniadanko

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Natalka Sniadanko’s 2001 debut novel The Passion Collection became a bestseller in Poland, and she went on to win Poland's Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski Literary Prize in 2011, Austria's Translators Award of the Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture in 2016 for her translation of Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, and the Paul Celan Scholarship for Translators in 2017. Her novel Archduke Wilhelm's Ordinary Exercise Books (2017) was longlisted for Poland's Angelus Central European Literature Award in 2023. In 2022, she became a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

Her novels – translated and published across Europe – moved from early explorations of Ukrainian identity and women's autonomy toward Central European historical memory: Archduke Wilhelm's Ordinary Exercise Books reconstructs the real life of Wilhelm von Habsburg, an Austrian archduke drawn into Ukraine's early twentieth-century independence movement, while The First Investigation of the Empress (2021) and Murders at the Burgtheater (2024) recast Empress Sisi as an amateur detective solving crimes in imperial Vienna. Across the range, critics note her fiction rarely has a single central hero, instead assembling separate stories into a mosaic. She has said creating strong women characters matters in every book she writes.

As a translator from German and Polish, she has brought Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Nobel laureates Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek, Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Herta Müller and others into Ukrainian. Her own journalism has appeared in Süddeutsche Zeitung Süddeutsche Zeitung and Gazeta Wyborcza Gazeta Wyborcza, and her essays and short fiction have been translated into English for The New York Times The New York Times, The Guardian The Guardian, The New Republic The New Republic, and Two Lines Two Lines.

The Guardian

Literature as last bastion: Natalka Sniadanko on suppression, solidarity and language in Ukraine Literature as last bastion: Natalka Sniadanko on suppression, solidarity and language in Ukraine

By Natalka Sniadanko for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network

The Ukranian author explains why professional writers simply ‘do not exist’ in her country in this essay about its literature and culture.

The New York Times

The Myth of a Divided Ukraine The Myth of a Divided Ukraine

By Natalka Sniadanko