Olena Stiazhkina

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Olena Stiazhkina's diary Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary – published by Harvard University Press in 2024 – has made her a frequent speaker on Ukraine at universities including Yale, Princeton, Oxford, and the University of California.

In 2023 she served as Oxford's second Ukrainian Writer in Residence at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. She holds a doctorate in history and a further Doctor of Sciences degree for research on women in Ukrainian culture and spent decades as a professor of history before becoming a senior research fellow at Ukraine's Institute of History – scholarly grounding that runs through both her diary and her fiction.

Her fiction returns often to how large-scale historical rupture plays out in ordinary lives: family memory and inheritance, women's interior experience against the sweep of official history, and identity as something reshaped rather than lost when the ground beneath it shifts. Her novel Cecil the Lion Had to Die (2021) follows twelve characters across three decades of sweeping historical change. Her most recent novel, Zelman's Little Boot (2025), follows a son piecing together his family's fractured history.