Ukraine Writes Back: Writers, Poets and the War

“Ukraine Writes Back: Writers, Poets and the War” is a series of four webinars jointly organised by the Research Initiative on Post-Soviet Space (RIPSS) at the University of Melbourne and the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand.

First webinar

“Names on the Maps”: Poetry Reading and Conversation with Oksana Lutsyshyna and Oksana Maksymchuk

“Names on the Maps” is a quotation from Oksana Maksymchuk’s poem “Cherry Orchard,” published in her collection Still City. In this webinar Oksana Lutsyshyna and Oksana Maksymchuk will read some of their recent poems and engage in discussion with Marko Pavlyshyn, Emeritus Professor in Ukrainian Studies at Monash University. In the course of the conversation they will reflect on the impact of the war on their literary work, the wartime role of Ukrainian literature in translation, the challenges of creating Ukrainian literature outside Ukraine and other questions that arise for Ukrainian poets and writers as they respond to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Time: Thursday 8 May 2025, 5 p.m. AEST

Registration via this LINK.

Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian writer, translator and poet, author of three novels, a collection of short stories and five books of poetry, the latest published in English translation in 2019 (Persephone Blues, Arrowsmith). For her latest novel, Ivan and Phoebe, now published in English by Deep Vellum Publishing, she was awarded the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize (2020) and the Taras Shevchenko National Award in fiction (2021). She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and is currently an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches the Ukrainian language and Eastern European literatures in translation.

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City is the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection, published by University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). She is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia (Pіramida, 2005) and Lovy (Smoloskyp, 2008) in the Ukrainian. She co-edited the anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2017) and has co-translated several poetry collections, most recently Alex Averbuch’s Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2025). She is a recipient of the National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship (2019), the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association (2024) and other honours. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University.

Second webinar

“Between Lines and Lives”: Poets Katia Mikhalitsyna and Iryna Starovoyt in Conversation with Alessandro Achilli

Time: Thursday 29 May 2025, 5 p.m. AEST

Details and registration link coming soon.