Join friends of Razom Book Club in meeting one of the most enigmatic Ukrainian poets, Iryna Shuvalova, and her translator, Olena Jennings.
Held in an intimate setting that turns the private act of reading poetry into a shared moment of gathering, this event celebrates the art of poetry and the magic of literary translation.
Event is in English with poetry read in Ukrainian and in English translation. Money raised with your ticket purchases will support Razom’s translation program.
- 7:00 pm Arrivals, Food and Drinks
- 7:45 pm Readings and Discussion
- 8:45 pm Dessert and Mingling
IRYNA SHUVALOVA is a poet and scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the author of five award-winning books of poetry, including Pray to the Empty Wells, available in English (Lost Horse Press, 2019). Her most recent and fifth book of poetry Stoneorchardwoods (2020) has been 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. In 2009, she co-edited 120 Pages of ‘Sodom’, the first anthology of queer writing in Ukraine. Her poetry has been translated into 25 languages and published internationally, including in Literary Hub, Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, and others. Shuvalova is also a scholar of culture, politics, and society in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. She is particularly interested in how political imaginaries are constructed through culture in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine. 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. Having lived in the US, the UK, Greece, and China, she is currently based in Oslo, Norway, where she is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo. Her new poetry collection Endsongs is forthcoming in early 2024 with VSL in Lviv.
OLENA JENNINGS is the author of the poetry collection Songs from an Apartment (Underground Books, 2017), the chapbook Memory Project (Underground, 2018), and the novel Temporary Shelter (Cervena Barva Press, 2021). She is a prolific translator of poetry and prose from Ukrainian. Her translation from Ukrainian of Vasyl Makhno’s collection Paper Bridge is forthcoming from Plamen Press. She is founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series.
Photo credit: Olga Zakrevska and Iryna Sosnovska
$50 of the ticket price is tax deductible. Purchase tickets.