Serhiy Osoka © Ali Ghandtschi

Serhiy Osoka  [ Ukraine ]

Serhiy Osoka was born in 1980 in Velyka Bahachka near Poltava. Until 2002 he studied philology at the V. G. Korolenko State Pedagogical University in Poltava (2002). He worked as a journalist for several years – at Poltava City Television and at a regional radio station. He is a member of the Council of the Poltava Regional Organisation of the National Writers’ Union of Ukraine. In 2002, his poetry collection “Сьома сніжинка січня” (tr. The Seventh Snowflake of January) was published. In a formal variety of quatrains, verse libre, distich, rhymed lines, each text hints at the magical world of Ukrainian traditions and the primordial wisdom of the Ukrainian people, unrolling in organic images and vivid language. The volume “Небесна падалиця” (2015; tr. Carcass of Heaven) also contains love poems and reflects the eternal confrontation between love and death from the perspective of memories as an attempt to capture the past in words. Osoka’s style is characterised by mythological thinking and vivid metaphors.
With “Нічні купання в серпні” (2016; tr. Night swimming in August), Osoka presented his first volume of prose. His stories are mostly based on real events and deal with existential experiences: Hunger, hopelessness, alienation, youth and old age, the agonies of knowledge and the bitterness of disappointment. The texts of the prose volume “Три лини для Марії” (2016; tr. Three tenches for Mary) tell of a childhood in the village of Poltava in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period. The portraits are mainly of its inhabitants. The theme of family relationships is often dealt with, especially the traumas resulting from fear and punishment. But the themes of loss and death are also present in the texts. They are narratives of people who would have gone unnoticed without the sharp eye of the narrator. With a few strokes, he draws an expressive portrait of their lives with all the sensual sensations – rustling reeds, the splashing of fish in a pond, the thud of falling apples, the creaking of old doors and the multitude of human sounds such as sighing, laughing or sobbing.
Osoka was a winner of the Granoslov-2000 international literary competition for young writers and won the 3rd prize of the Smoloskip Publishing House for the poetry collection “Голос мисливця” (2006; tr. Voice of the Hunter), as well as the Feodosii Rogovoi Regional Prize (2018). He also works as a literary translator, mainly translating works by Oleh Senzov. Serhiy Osoka lives in Poltava.

Bibliography

Небесна падалиця, Львів , 2015.

Нічні купання в серпні — Львів , 2016.

Три лини для Марії, збірка новел – Львів, 2017.