Oksana Zabuzhko

writer

Oksana Zabuzhko (* 1960) is a Ukrainian writer and one of the most prominent figures of contemporary Ukrainian culture. She studied philosophy at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. She garnered international acclaim for her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), which sparked an unprecedented public debate and became one of the most influential books of the early years of Ukrainian independence. Her novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2009) is considered the pinnacle of her prose work; this sweeping generational fresco was one of the first contemporary Ukrainian novels to intertwine personal and family memory with the repressed history of the twentieth century. Other works of hers published in English include A Kingdom of Fallen Statues: Poems and Essays (1996) and the collection of short stories Your Ad Could Go Here (2014). Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages and have won numerous international awards, including the Angelus Central European Literature Award (2013), the Taras Shevchenko National Prize (2019), and the French Legion of Honour (2023).