EVENT: Still City by Oksana Maksymchuk
This event has now passed.
It is our pleasure to welcome Ukrainian poet Oksana Maksymchuk to Dublin to celebrate her English language debut, Still City: Diary of an Invasion from Carcanet Press. Oksana’s collection was highly commended for the Forward Prize 2024 and has been praised for its “devastating emotional turns, […] its humanity and emotional resonance, as well as its clarity on the psychological and physical sufferings of civilians during wartime.”
Oksana will read from her collection and discuss the work with celebrated Irish poet Moya Cannon at Books Upstairs on Thursday 20 November at 6.30pm. Admission to this event is free, but booking using the form below is essential. Please join us for this fantastic and rare opportunity to see Oksana Maksymchuk here in Dublin.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut in English, reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Inevitably, there are dramatic shifts in perspective: this diary of an invasion recreates the mood and tone of the context within which a poet’s imagination must make sense of the change.
Drawing on various sources, including social media, the news, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience. The book began ‘as a poetic journal I started keeping in my hometown of Lviv, Ukraine in 2021–22. In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of a catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity. While we, as a family and a community, made preparations for air strikes, as well as nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, our relationships transformed, as did our sense of time, fate, and personhood.’
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:
OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK was born in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1982. She is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia and Lovy, in the Ukrainian, as well as a co-editor of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry. Her English-language poems appeared in The Irish Times, The London Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry London, PN Review, The Poetry Review and elsewhere. Oksana was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and a winner of Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association of America, Peterson Translated Book Award, American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, Richmond Lattimore Prize, and Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize. She holds a PhD in ancient philosophy from Northwestern University. In recent years, Oksana has been dividing her time between her home in Lviv and various visiting appointments in the United States and Europe.
MOYA CANNON is an Irish poet with six published collections, including most recently her Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2021). The mountains, the shoreline and our primal and enduring responses to the beauty of the endangered earth are the inspiration for many of her poems. Archaeology and geology figure too as gateways to deeper understanding of our mysterious relationship with the natural world and our past. Music, particularly traditional Irish music, has always been a deep interest and is a constant theme. She has received the Brendan Behan Award and the O’Shaughnessy Award and was 2011 Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University. She was born in Co. Donegal and now lives in Dublin.
