Voices of Babyn Yar

Marianna Kiyanovska is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and literary translation and her works have been translated into eighteen languages. She received the 2022 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. In 2020, Kiyanovska was recognized with the prestigious Taras Shevchenko Prize for The Voices of Babyn Yar. She was also awarded the 2013 Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture in Poland. Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. With Max Rosochinsky, she won the first place in the Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions and was awarded a National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship. For the translation of Marianna Kiyanovska’sThe Voices of Babyn Yar (2022), Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky were awarded the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the Peterson Translated Book Award, and the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Translation Prize. Max Rosochinsky is a poet, scholar, and translator. With Oksana Maksymchuk, he co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, and co-translated Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk, and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska. Their award-winning work has been supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Fulbright Scholar Program, and others.

There is no doubt that The Voices of Babyn Yar is destined to become a classic text in the Ukrainian canon. Will this poetry save nations or people? Of course not. But it will forever serve as a reminder of the human capacity for evil—a prompt we seem to require on a regular basis.