Halyna Kruk

With its “Ukrainian Voices” series, asphalt Festival 2023 is turning its attention to Ukrainian artists who are reacting to the Russian invasion. The prominent Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk will give this year’s festival speech and also address this topic. For Halyna Kruk, poetry is unthinkable without the immediate reality that surrounds us. She says it is not possible for her “to write about stars in the sky when there is something more important, timely and topical.”

Halyna Kruk was born in Lviv in 1974. A multi-award-winning poet, writer and literary scholar, she is the author of five books of poetry, An Adult Woman (2017), Co(an)existence (2013), The Face beyond the Photograph (2005), Footprints on Sand and Journeys in Search of a Home (both 1997), a collection of short stories Anyone but me (2021) and several books for children. Her works have been translated into more than thirty languages and published in various poetry collections, journals and anthologies in many countries. Kruk was Vice-President of Ukrainian PEN from 2017 to 2019 and holds a professorship in literary studies at the University of Lviv, where she teaches European and Ukrainian Baroque literature.

She has won numerous literary awards, including the Women in Arts Award 2023, the Kovaliv Fund Award 2022, the Best Book Award of BookForum 2021, the Smoloskyp Poetry Award, the Bohdan-Ihor Antonych Award, the Granoslov Award and the Step by Step international competition for children’s books. Halyna Kruk participated in numerous literary festivals in Ukraine and abroad. In response to Russia’s interventions and invasion, she has co-created several multimedia projects, including “The BookWar” in collaboration with electronic musician Yurko Yefremov and singer Halyna Breslavets, and “The Resistance of Matter”, a poetry and music project based on her poems. Her brilliant speech at the Berlin 2022 Poetry Festival about the war in her home country caused a big stir and was published in DIE ZEIT and elsewhere.

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