Books & Books and Writers for Democratic Action present…

An Afternoon with Julia Fiedorczuk, Valzhyna Mort,

Hosted by WDA founding member Tara Skurtu.

Julia Fiedorczuk is a writer, poet, translator, researcher and a practitioner of ecocriticism, emphasizing the world-making power of literature. Her work foregrounds the relationship between human beings and their planetary environment. She is affiliated at the Institute of English Studies at Warsaw University. She has published essays, novels and short story collections, as well as six volumes of poetry. The latest of those, Psalmy, was awarded the Wisława Szymborska Prize, Poland’s most prestigious prize for Poetry. She founded the School of Ecopoetics at Warsaw’s Institute of Reportage. Her writings have been translated into over 20 languages.

Askold Melnyczuk has published ten books, including four novels, a book of stories, and a novella based on the life of Rimbaud. These have been variously cited as a New York Times Notable and an LA Times Best Books of the Year. He coedited From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine, the Selected Poems of Oksana Zabuzhko, and a chapbook on Father Daniel Berrigan. He received a three-year fellowship in Fiction from the Lila Wallace Foundation and the George Garrett Award, as well as the PEN Magid Award for his founding of the journal Agni. He’s founder of Arrowsmith Press and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by The New York Times, and the winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, and others. Mort teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. She translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She has received the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors (Germany) and a Crystal of Vilenica prize (Slovenia).

Maxim Osipov is a Russian writer and cardiologist. In the early 1990s he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Moscow, where he practiced medicine while founding a publishing house. In 2005, while working at a hospital in Tarusa, ninety miles from Moscow, Osipov established a charitable foundation to ensure the hospital’s survival. Since 2007, he’s published five collections of prose. His plays have been staged all across Russia. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His debut collection in English, Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories, translated by Boris Dralyuk and others, was published as part of the NYRB Classics series in 2019.

Andrey Kurkov, born in Leningrad, USSR, is a Ukrainian novelist who writes in Russian. He is the author of 25 books of fiction and non-fiction, including the international bestseller, Death and the Penguin. He has also published 10 books for children and about 20 TV and movie scripts. His work has been translated into 37 languages and published in 65 countries.

Kurkov is a respected commentator on Ukraine for international media and has published numerous articles in various publications worldwide. His most recent novel, Grey Bees, was translated by Boris Dralyuk. He is currently President of PEN Ukraine.

The State of Democracy in Eastern Europe: An Afternoon with Writers for Democratic Action