Part of Series
Winner of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies 2018-2019 Prize for Best Translation into English New York Elegies attempts to demonstrate how descriptions and evocations of New York City are connected to various stylistic modes and topical questions urgent to Ukrainian poetry throughout its development. The collection thus gives readers the opportunity to view New York through various poetic and stylistic lenses. Ukrainian poets connected themselves to a powerful myth of New York, the myth of urban modernity and problematic vitality. The city of exiles and outsiders sees itself reflected in the mirror that newcomers and exiles created. By adding new voices and layers to this amalgam, it is possible to observe the expanded picture of this worldly poetic city. Ostap Kin is an archivist and literary researcher. He co-translated The Maidan After Hours (2017), a chapbook by Vasyl Lozynsky and Songs for a Dead Rooster (forthcoming with Lost Horse Press), a collection of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych.
Authors
Iryna Shuvalova (Ірина Шувалова) is a poet, translator, and scholar born in Ukraine. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College (2014), where she was a Fulbright scholar, and a PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge (2020), where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar. In 2023, she joined the University of Oslo in Norway as a postdoctoral fellow. As of early 2025, Shuvalova authored five books of poetry in Ukrainian, including Ran (2011), Os (2014), and Az (2014). Her 2020 volume stoneorchardwoods ('каміньсадліс', 2020) was named poetry book of the year by Ukraine's Litakcent Book Prize. Her new poetry collection endsongs ('кінечні пісні'), published in 2024, has been praised as 'a future classic'. Shuvalova’s writing has been widely anthologized, and published in periodicals in Ukraine and beyond, including Literary Hub, Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, and others. Her poems have been translated into thirty-two languages and published as stand-alone volumes in English and Polish, with further book-length collections forthcoming in Norwegian, Swedish, and Italian. In particular, her 2019 collection in English Pray to the Empty Wells has been described as 'a revelation' by The Observer. Her own translations include, most recently, poems by Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald and Louise Glück (into Ukrainian) and a co-translation of Ostap Slyvynskyi's poetry collection The Winter King (into English). The latter was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in the US in 2024. Shuvalova's translations into English appeared in Ambit, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poem, and Words Without Borders. In 2009, she co-edited the first anthology of queer literature in Ukraine 120 Pages of ‘Sodom’, and in 2025, co-founded the first queer poetry contest in Ukraine, ‘hol[o]sni!’. Shuvalova has been awarded numerous prizes for poetry and translation, including the first prize for poetry in the Smoloskyp Literary Competition (2010) and Stephen Spender / Joseph Brodsky Prize (2012). In 2017-2018, she supported English PEN as an expert on Ukrainian translation projects. Since 2020, she has been a member of PEN Ukraine. She has taught creative writing and translation courses for LitOsvita and the Arvon Foundation. Shuvalova performed her poetry at multiple readings and festivals in Ukraine and beyond. She also participated in international writing residencies and fellowships, including the Hawthornden Castle Fellowship (2015)the Chinese European Art Center / CEAC (China, 2024) and the Literary Colloquium Berlin / LCB (Germany, 2025). She has lived and worked in Ukraine, the US, the UK, Greece, China, and Norway.
