SERHIY ZHADAN

SERHIY ZHADAN is the most popular poet of the post-independence generation in Ukraine. His work speaks to the disillusionment, difficulties, and ironies brought by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Zhadan’s readings fill large auditoriums, and he publishes regularly. He is considered to be Ukraine’s most important poet of the decade, and even one of the leading voices of the last century.

Serhiy Zhadan was born on August 23, 1974 in the town of Starobilsk in the Luhansk oblast of eastern Ukraine. He graduated from the Kharkiv Teacher’s College, where he wrote a thesis on the work of Mykhail Semenko and the Ukrainian Futurist writers of the 1920s. Zhadan currently lives in Kharkiv and writes poetry, prose and essays; he also translates from German, Belarusian, Polish and Russian. Zhadan is the author of the collections of poetry Rozhevyi degenerat (Pink Degenerate, 1993), Tsytatnyk (Quotations, 1995), Heneral Iuda (General Judas, 1995), Pepsi (1998), the very, very best poems, psychedelic stories of fighting and other bullshit (selected works 1992-2000, 2000), Balady pro viinu i vidbudovu (Ballads about War and Reconstruction, 2001), Istoriia kultury pochatku stolittia (History of Culture at the Turn of the Century, 2003), UkSSR (2004), Maradona (2007), Lili Marlene (2009), Efiopiia (Ethiopia, 2009), Vohnepalni i nozhovi (Gunshot and Cut Wounds, 2012), Zhyttia Mariï (The Life of Mary, 2015), and Tampliiery (Knights Templar, 2016). He is the author of the prose publications Big Mak (Big Mac, 2003), Depesh Mod (Depeche Mode, 2004), Anarchy in the UKR (2005), Himn demokratychnoï molodi (The Hymn of the Democratic Youth, 2006), Voroshylovhrad (2010), Big Mak ta inshi istroiï (Big Mac and Other Stories, 2011), and Mesopotamiia (Mesopotamia, 2014). In 2014, Voroshylovhrad received the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize for Literature and the Best Book of the Decade award from the BBC Ukrainian Service. Zhadan has also written several theater pieces, which have been staged in Kharkiv and New York. He has also compiled and edited several anthologies of poetry and prose. Zhadan’s work has been translated into German, English, Swedish, French, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Russian, and Armenian. He performs with the band Sobaky v Kosmosi (Dogs in Space). English-language translations of two of his novels, Depeche Mode and Voroshilovgrad, were published in 2013 and 2016 respectively. Translations of Mesopotamiia and of a volume of selected poems are forthcoming from Yale University Press.