Ukrainian News and Muse avec Lyuba Yakimchuk

Lyuba Yakimchuk is a poet, screenwriter, playwright, born 1985 in Pervomaisk Luhanska oblast, and currently living in Kyiv, Ukraine.

She is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Apricots of Donbas, which is about people surviving a war. Apricots of the Donbas received the International Poetic Award of the Kovalev Foundation (NYC, USA). This book was listed in the Top 10 books about the war — Forbes magazine’s rating in Ukraine. Kyiv’s New Time magazine (Novoye Vremia) listed Yakimchuk among the one hundred most influential people in the arts in Ukraine.

Her poems have been translating into roughly twenty languages, including English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Greek, Estonian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Slovak, Belarusian, Romanian, Hungarian, Georgian, Azerbaijani and Serbian. She has also authored two film scripts and two plays. Her new play The Wall was produced at the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, the largest and the oldest Ukrainian theatre.

Yakimchuk has received a number of awards, including the International Slavic Poetic Award, the Bohdan-Ihor Antonych Prize and Smoloskyp Prize, three of Ukraine’s most prestigious awards for young poets.

Lyuba performed in a musical and poetic duet with a double-bass player Mark Tokar (Lviv, Ukraine) and a vocalist Olesya Zdorovetska (Dublin, UK). As a vocalist, she performed in Fokstroty project by Serhiy Zhadan and Yuri Gurzhy. Her poetry is also performed by a singer Mariana Sadovska (Germany) in project «2014».