top of page
WINTER KING

WINTER KING

$24.00Price

ISBN: 978-8-9865715-5-3

Pub Date: Oct. 2023

Pages: 126


By Ostap Slyvynsky

Vitaly Chernetsky and Iryna Shuvalova, translators


Winter King by Ostap Slyvynsky presents a selection from a decade and a half worth of work by one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary voices in poetry. Slyvynsky is the poet of everyday things. He writes of children’s games, old trees, and family stories. Yet, what emerges from under his pen is the portrait of an era. His writing, simultaneously delicate and unflinchingly incisive, like a surgeon’s hand, always probes for the bottomless depths gaping behind the mundane. Perhaps the greatest of Slyvynsky’s gifts as a poet is his ability to examine individual voices and memories for traces of larger historical events without ever trivializing the former in the face of the latter. His spare, lean poems unearth a complex and layered human reality that is both universal and strikingly, almost painfully, rooted in the landscape that birthed it, be it the poet’s family home in the Carpathian Mountains or the Maidan Square in Kyiv, aflame with revolution. Slyvynsky’s remarkable attention to detail results in strikingly beautiful and enigmatic texts that invite multiple re-readings, each peeling off yet another layer of reality. However, what always remains at the core after these layers are stripped off is the poet’s profound humanity. Drawing on three of Slyvynsky’s earlier poetry collections, this volume also includes some of his most recent poems­—arguably, among the poet’s best.

    “Vitaly Chernetsky’s and Iryna Shuvalova’s translations are measured, musical renditions of the masterfully curated originals. Subtle and nuanced, the verses achieve an admirable balance between interpretative rigor and poetic virtuosity.”

    — Jury comments for the 2024 American Association for Ukrianian Studies Translation Prize


    Ostap Slyvynsky is a Ukrainian poet, translator, essayist, and scholar. He authored five books of poetry: Sacrifice of Big Fish (1998), The Midday Line (2004), Ball in Darkness (2008), Adam (2012), The Winter King (2018), as well as The Dictionary of War (2023), a documentary book based on the testimony of participants and witnesses of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. His books have been published in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Macedonia. He is also known for translating the works by Derek Walcott, William Carlos Williams, Charles Simic, Czesław Miłosz, Olga Tokarczuk, Georgi Gospodinov, and many others. Since 2021, he organizes PEN Ukraine’s festival Propysy (The Writings) aimed at novice authors. He was elected the Vice President of PEN Ukraine in 2022.


    Vitaly Chernetsky is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. A native of Odesa, Ukraine, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has been translating poetry and prose into English since the mid-1990s. His translations into English include Yuri Andrukhovych’s novels The Moscoviad (2008) and Twelve Circles (2015) and a volume of his selected poems, Songs for a Dead Rooster (Lost Horse Press, 2018, with Ostap Kin), a book by the Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze, Zhdanovka (2006), and two children’s books by Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv, Sound (2020) and Sight (2021). Translation of Sophia Andrukhovych’s novel Felix Austria is in press from Harvard.


    Iryna Shuvalova is a poet and scholar from Kyiv, Ukraine, based in Oslo, Norway. She is the author of five award-winning books of poetry, including Pray to the Empty Wells available in English (Lost Horse Press, 2019). Her most recent and fifth book of poetry Stoneorchardwoods (2020) has been named book of the year by Ukraine’s LitAktsent Prize for Literature and received the Special Prize of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Book Award. In 2009, she co-edited 120 Pages of ‘Sodom,’ the first anthology of queer writing in Ukraine. Her poetry has been translated into 25 languages and published internationally, including in Modern Poetry in Translation, The White Review, Literary Hub, Die Zeit, and others. Her forthcoming academic monograph ‘Donbas Is My Sparta’: Identity and Belonging in the Songs of the Russo-Ukrainian War explores the impact of the war on Ukrainian society. She holds a PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar, and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she was a Fulbright scholar. 

    bottom of page