photo © Justin Warsh

Vasyl Makhno [Ukraine]

Vasyl Makhno was born in Chortkiv, in the Ukrainian province Ternopil, in 1964. After completing his studies at the Pedagogical Institute in Ternopil, he graduated in literature and worked as an assistant professor at the University. In 1999 his doctoral thesis about Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, a prominent representative of Ukrainian modernism, was published.  In the late nineties he taught at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He is a poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. As a poet, Makhno’s words are haunting and introspective, offering readers a voice of the time and a perspective that is both deeply personal and universal. He published fourteen poetry collections. His most recent collection, One Sail House, was published in 2021, following Poet,Ocean and Fish (2019) and Paper Bridge (2017) appeared in 2017. He is also the author of a book of short stories, The House In Baiting Hollow (2015) and a novel, The Eternal Calendar (2019). He has also published five books of essays: The Gertrude Stein Memorial Cultural and Recreation Park (2006), Horn of Plenty (2011), Suburbs and Borderland (2019), Biking Along the Ocean (2020), and From Consonants to Vowels: an Encyclopedia of Names, Places, Birds, Plants and Other Things (2023) as well as two plays: Coney Island (2006) and Bitch/Beach Generation (2007). Makhno’s works have been widely translated into many languages; his books have been published in Germany, Israel, Poland, Romania, Serbia and the US. He was a participant in many international festivals, symposiums and meeting of writers in Germany, Colombia, India, Israel, Mongolia, Poland, Nicaragua, Romania,  Serbia, Turkey, and the US. He translated Zbigniew Herbert’s, Janusz Szuber’s, Bohdan Zadura’s, Anna Frajlich’s, Gottfried Benn’s, Vasko Popa’s, and Reymond Carver’s poetry into Ukrainian, and edited an anthology of young Ukrainian poets from the 1990’s. He is the recipient of Kovaliv Fund Prize (2008), Serbia’s International “Povele Morave” Prize in Poetry (2013), the BBC Book of the Year Award (2015), International Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize “Encounter” (2020), and others. Makhno currently lives with his family in New York City.