Book Launch: Selected Works in Two Volumes by Vasyl Makhno

Vasyl Makhno is regarded as one of the contemporary Ukrainian poetic voices on the global stage, with his works translated into more than twenty languages. Skhyma is the most comprehensive collection of his poetry, featuring works written between 1993 and 2023. In addition to his poetry, Makhno’s essays offer a unique insight into his artistic and personal world. The book Chickens Don’t Fly gathers essays written from 2002 to 2023. These essays intertwine memories, autobiographical stories, and reflections on others, with some resembling short stories that form a cohesive tapestry, while others take readers on a journey through various spaces — and ultimately, through life.

Vasyl Makhno is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry: Skhyma (1993), Caesar’s Solitude (1994), The Book of Hills and Hours (1996), The Flipper of the Fish (2002), 38 Poems about New York and Some Other Things (2004), Cornelia Street Café: New and Selected Poems (2007), Winter Letters (2011), I Want to be Jazz and Rock’n’Roll (2013), Bike (2015), Jerusalem Poems (2016), Paper Bridge (2017), A Poet, the Ocean and Fish (2019), and most recently One Sail House (2021). He has also published a book of short stories, The House in Baiting Hollow (2015), a novel, The Eternal Calendar (2019), and five books of essays, The Gertrude Stein Memorial Cultural and Recreation Park (2006), Horn of Plenty (2011), Suburbs and Borderland (2019), Biking along the Ocean (2020), and From Consonants to Vowels: an Encyclopedia of Names, Places, Birds, Plants and Other Things (2023). Makhno’s works have been widely translated into many languages; his books have been published in Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Serbia and the US.

He translated Zbigniew Herbert’s, Janusz Szuber’s, Bohdan Zadura’s and Anna Frajlich’s poetry from Polish into Ukrainian, and edited an anthology of young Ukrainian poets from the 1990’s. He is the recipient of Kovaliv Fund Prize (2008), Serbia’s International Povele Morave Prize in Poetry (2013), the BBC Book of the Year Award (2015), and International Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize “Encounter” (2020).

Moderator: Tamara Hundorova (Princeton University)

The presentation will be delivered in Ukrainian.

Admission to this event is free. Registration is required. Suggested donation is $20