Oleksandr (Alex) Averbuch, a native of Novoaidar, Luhans’k region, Ukraine, is a literary historian, poet, and translator. He is the author of three books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Ukrainian, English, and Russian. His poetry deals with the issues of ethnic fragmentation and in-betweenness, multiple identities, queerness, cross- and multilingualism, documentalist writing, and memory. He has organized numerous poetic performances and festivals, such as the International Festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry. In 2022 he organized a series of bilingual (Ukrainian-Hebrew) literary events dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian poetry in Hebrew translation, involving prominent Ukrainian and Israeli poets and translators. Currently he is compiling and editing an anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry in Hebrew translation. He earned his PhD in Slavic and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto. Since 2022 he has been an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta.
Halyna Kruk is a poet, translator, and Medieval literature professor at Lviv State University. She has been recognized as a significant voice in Ukrainian poetry since her twenties. She has published five collected volumes of poetry and two volumes of prose fiction. Her children’s fiction has been rendered into fifteen languages. She has won numerous Ukrainian and European awards for her writing.
Iryna Shuvalova is a poet and scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine, based in Nanjing, China. She is the author of five award-winning books of poetry, including Pray to the Empty Wells and Stoneorchardwoods (2020) which was named book of the year by Ukraine’s Litaktsent Prize for Literature and received the Special Prize of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Book Award. She co-edited 120 Pages of ‘Sodom,’ the first anthology of queer writing in Ukraine. Her poetry has been translated into 23 languages and published internationally. Her forthcoming academic monograph ‘Donbas Is My Sparta’: Identity and Belonging in the Songs of the Russo-Ukrainian War explores the impact of the war on Ukrainian society. She holds a PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar, and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she was a Fulbright scholar.
Іvan Baidak (born in 1990) is a daring Ukrainian fiction writer whose debut novel Personally Me Personally for You (2013) became a national bestseller and garnered excellent critical reviews. His two short story collections, Role Plays (2014) and The Shadows of Our Dates (2017), topped bookstore bestseller lists and have been translated into several different languages. In 2020, he wrote a novel about inclusion, (In)visible, which was recognized as one of the best in 2020 according to PEN Ukraine, has been the basis of a play and several photo exhibitions.