Oksana Zabuzhko

Photo: Łukasz Giza

To view the full-size version, click here here

Oksana Zabuzhko emerged as one of the defining voices in contemporary European literature in 1996, when her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex – since translated into 24 languages and hailed by critics as a "Ukrainian feminist Bible" – turned questions of national self-identification, postcolonial legacy, and female subjectivity into an international literary event.

With a PhD in philosophy of arts and an academic background in aesthetics, Zabuzhko is now one of Ukraine's most recognized literary figures worldwide: more than twenty books translated into over 25 languages, honoured with the French Order of the Legion of Honor (2023), the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine (2019), and the Angelus Central European Literary Prize (2013). From a Fulbright Fellowship and Writer-in-Residence posts at Harvard, Penn State, and Pittsburgh in the early 1990s, to a plenary address at the European Parliament and a seat on the Berlinale's international jury, she has carried that authority onto the world's leading stages.

Her work traces the fight to reclaim a silenced history and the tension between individual and national identity. The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2009), a saga spanning six decades of Ukrainian history, was ranked by Tages-Anzeiger among the twenty best novels of the twenty-first century and by Polityka (Poland) among the most important Eastern European novels since 1989. Since Russia's full-scale invasion, her essay The Longest Journey (2022) – on the historical roots of the war – has already been translated into more than ten languages.

Her work has also crossed into other art forms: staged as a one-woman play at Teatr Polonia in Warsaw (dir. Krystyna Janda, touring Kyiv, Lviv, and Toronto), adapted into the mono-opera Clytemnestra by composer Virko Baley (premiered at Merkin Hall, New York), and dramatized on screen through the documentary inspired by her essay collection Chronicles of Fortinbras (1999). Her poetry has been set to music by numerous Ukrainian and international composers, and theatrical adaptations of her prose continue to be staged across Ukraine, Europe, and North America.