Writer-in-Residence: Volodymyr Rafeyenko (Ukraine) & Translator Mark Andryczyk

Meet City of Asylum Writer-in-Residence Volodymyr Rafeyenko as he takes to the stage for his first full-length program at Alphabet City! Volodymyr is an award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, and literary and film critic from Kyiv, Ukraine, who has been in residence at City of Asylum since 2023. After several impactful readings in our annual Jazz Poetry festival, as well as accompaniments to his fellow Writers-in-Residence, we can’t wait for audiences to get to know Volodymyr better through this third installment of our new series. 

For this program, Volodymyr will be in conversation with translator Mark Andryczyk as they discuss the three books Volodymyr has written, which Mark has translated from the original Ukrainian into English. These featured works include Volodymyr’s Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love, Petrichor: The Scent of the Earth after Rain (not yet published), and Signals of Being. The pair will discuss the translation process, the writing process, and the relationship between the writer and the translator in projects like these. 

In addition to this discerning discussion, the program will include readings in Ukrainian and in English of select excerpts from the books, as well as an audience Q&A, moderated by Polina Peker.

You can purchase a copy of Volodymyr’s book Mondegreen at City of Asylum Bookstore.

This program is made possible in part with the support of The Bare Life Review, a literary organization supporting immigrant and asylum-seeking writers. The Bare Life Review is a member of Intersection for the Arts, a historic arts nonprofit organization that provides people working in arts and culture with fiscal sponsorship and resources to grow.

About the Author:

Volodymyr Rafeyenko is an award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, and literary and film critic from Kyiv, Ukraine. He graduated from Donetsk University with a degree in Russian philology and culture studies. From 1992 to 2018, he wrote his works in Russian, was mainly published in Russia, and was considered a representative of Russian literature. Following the outbreak of Russian aggression in Ukraine, Volodymyr left Donetsk and moved to a town near Kyiv. There, he wrote Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love, his first novel in the Ukrainian language, which was shortlisted for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize—Ukraine’s highest award in arts and culture. Volodymyr learned Ukrainian from scratch and has dedicated himself to speaking Ukrainian, rather than Russian, his mother tongue, as an act of resistance and perseverance. Among other recognitions, he is the winner of the Volodymyr Korolenko Prize for the novel Brief Farewell Book (1999) and the Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award for the novel The Length of Days (2017). Volodymyr’s prose is full of phantasmagorical images and storylines, as well as explicit and implicit allusions to well-known texts. He is sometimes called the “magical postmodernist” due to the intertextuality and richness of his prose. He is a Research Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh and a Writer-in-Residence at City of Asylum with his wife, Olesia Rafeyenko, since June 2023.

About the Translator:

Mark Andryczyk administers the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and teaches Ukrainian literature at its Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He has a PhD in Ukrainian Literature from the University of Toronto (2005). His monograph, The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2012. Mark is editor, compiler, and a translator of The White Chalk of Days, the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2017) —republished by Penguin in 2022 as Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965. He has translated 11 essays by Yuri Andrukhovych for the award-winning publication My Final Territory: Selected Essays (University of Toronto Press, 2018). He is the translator of Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2022) and the editor, compiler, and a translator of Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War (Penguin, 2023).

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is open for dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. Please visit OpenTable or call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.