Set Change

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.

Ostap Kin is a translator of Ukrainian poetry. He is the editor of New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City, which won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Prize for Best Translation, and his cotranslation with John Hennessy of Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography was a cowinner of the Derek Walcott Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.


John Hennessy is a poetry editor at The Common and the author of two poetry collections, Bridge and Tunnel and Coney Island Pilgrims. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013, Believer, Harvard Review, and HuffPost. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.