Radio Night

When I think about Ukrainian literature today, with all the grief and struggle it is going through, the voice of Yuri Andrukhovych comes to mind—strikingly original, witty, and poignant. Andrukhovych’s work speaks to the traditions of Ukrainian modernism, and it also signifies the now, fully engaging with the tasks of literature in a country at war. A wit and a wiseman, a public intellectual and a bookworm, Andrukhovch embodies the confluence of poetics and politics in today’s challenging world. —Polina Barskova, author of Living Pictures


In this action-packed picaresque novel, Andrukhovych gives himself room for rapid twists and turns, but also for fairy-tale-like effects…. Under the wild, chaotic, sometimes comical shell is a bitter, black core, a universal sadness about the victims of history, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin. —Richard Kämmerlings, Die Welt

Yuri Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist. In the mid-1980s, he cofounded the poetical group Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Blaster-Buffoonery), which rebelled against socialist realism and instead promoted a new poetic ethos of aesthetic freedom and the ludic. Widely regarded as one of the most important figures in contemporary Ukrainian literature, he is the recipient of the 2014 Hannah Arendt Prize and the 2016 Goethe Medal. He lives in Ukraine.

Mark Andryczyk teaches Ukrainian literature at Columbia University, where he administers the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute. He has translated the works of Volodymyr Rafeyenko and Yuri Andrukhovych, and he is the editor, compiler, and a translator of the anthologies Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965 and Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War.

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