Larissa Babij is a Ukrainian-American translator, writer, and Awareness Through Movement (Feldenkrais method) teacher based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Her translations of Ukrainian artists–thinkers have appeared in Krytyka and The Evergreen Review. She is also a freelance interpreter between Ukrainian and English, specialising in movement/performance and military training. Her book A Kind of Refugee, based on her wartime dispatches on Substack, will be published by ibidem Press in 2024.

Yelyzaveta Bolotova is a Kyiv-based translator working between English and Ukrainian. She translates into English full-time, helping map the cyber underground. Her freelance work is in literary translation, game localisation, and film. Among other things, she has worked on the novels The World and All That It Holds and Ruination, the games Oxygen Not Included and Layers of Fear, translated into Ukrainian, and the documentary series Gone with the Water.

William Ronald Debnam, from Hertfordshire, is a second year doctoral student at Columbia University’s Department of Slavic Languages. He holds an MA in Slavic Languages from Columbia University and a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages from the University of Cambridge. His current research focuses on Ukrainian modernist literature of the 1920s, and specifically how it engages with political questions around Ukrainianisation and Soviet nationalities policy more broadly.

John Farndon is a best-selling author of over 1000 non-fiction books, a playwright, songwriter, poet, and an award-winning translator of literary works. Over the last three years he has translated hundreds of Ukrainian poems and over 30 new Ukrainian plays in conjunction with the Worldwide Ukrainian Playreading Project, including Neda Nejdana’s Pussycat in Memory of Darkness, and Inna Goncharova’s The Trumpeter, staged at London’s Finborough and on tour. Joint winner of the 2019 EBRD Literature prize for Hamid Ismailov’s Devil’s Dance, 2020 finalist for the PEN Translation Prize for co-translating Rollan Seisenbaev’s The Dead Wander in the Desert.

Daisy Gibbons is a translator from Ukrainian into English. Her literary translations include Sofia Andrukhovych’s Amadoca (forthcoming, Simon & Schuster), Artem Chapeye’s Weathering (Seven Stories Press), Tamara Duda’s Shevchenko Award-winning Daughter (Bilka Press). Her translations have been featured in translation collections such as Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories (Deep Vellum) and extracts of her work have appeared in Harpers, Vanity Fair, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Amelia M. Glaser is Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she is also the Director of the Institute for Arts and Humanities and holds an endowed chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern University Press, 2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard University Press, 2020). She is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (University of Toronto Press, 2020). Her translations include Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); and, with Yuliya Ilchuk, Halyna Kruk’s A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and Iya Kiva’s Silenced Dressed in Cyrillic Letters (forthcoming with Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2026).

Marta Gosovska holds a Master’s degree in theory of literature and comparative studies. Her academic focus revolves around the theory of translation and modern Ukrainian literature. Conversely, her translation portfolio encompasses Ukrainian literature into English, with a particular emphasis on poetry, plays, and fiction. A co-translation of hers, A Ukrainian Christmas by Nadiyka Gerbish and Yaroslav Hrytsak, was published by Sphere last year. Beyond translation, she contributes to academia as a literature and creative writing instructor at UCU University in Lviv, all while nurturing my own writing endeavours.

Yuliya Ilchuk is an Associate Professor and the Director of Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at Stanford University. Her major research interests include – broadly – cultural exchange, interaction, and borrowing between Russia and Ukraine. Her first triple-award-winning book, Nikolai Gogol’s Hybrid Performance (University of Toronto Press, 2021), revises Gogol’s identity and texts as ambivalent and hybrid. Ilchuk’s most recent book project, The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine, revisits the major issues of memory studies and shifts the discussion from collective remembrance to the cultural dimensions of forgetting. Ilchuk has also published several translations of Ukrainian poetry and edited and translated works for the anthology Ukrainian Literary Modernism: A Critical Reader (forthcoming with Academic Studies Press, 2025).

Helena Kernan is a literary translator of Ukrainian and holds master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley. Originally from the UK, she has lived in several European cities, including Kyiv, where she worked with the Theatre of Displaced People and Centre for Civil Liberties, and is now based in Berlin. She works with a wide variety of texts, from contemporary Ukrainian drama to poetry, documentary films, witness testimony, and editorial pieces. In 2024 she was chosen as a participant in the inaugural Translating Ukraine Summer Institute held in Wrocław, Poland.

Ali Kinsella holds an MA in Slavic studies from Columbia University and has been translating from Ukrainian for thirteen years. With co-translator Dzvinia Orlowsky, she was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and granted a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her translation of Taras Prokhasko’s novel, Anna’s Other Days, won the 2019 Kovaliv Fund Prize and was published in the collection Earth Gods (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2025). She co-edited Love in Defiance of Pain (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022), an anthology of short fiction to support Ukrainians during the war. She is currently working on translations of Oleksander Dovzhenko, Halyna Kruk, Myroslav Laiuk, Vasyl Makhno, Iryna Vilde, and Sofia Yablonska.

Liubov Kukharenko is a translator from Kyiv with a varied experience, mostly focused on film and television translation, including subtitling, dubbing scripts, and scripts for production. After a brief pause in her translation career and a move to Toronto, Canada, she is coming back to translation with a renewed vigour and passion, having continued work with film festivals and script translations from Ukrainian into English.

Hanna Leliv is a freelance literary translator working between Ukrainian and English. She was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation MFA program and mentee at the Emerging Translators Mentorship Program run by the UK National Center for Writing. Her translations of contemporary Ukrainian literature into English have appeared in Asymptote, BOMB, Washington Square Review, Circumference, and elsewhere. In 2022, Cappy and the Whale, a children’s book by Kateryna Babkina, was published in her translation by Penguin Random House UK. Currently, Hanna is a translator-in-residence at Princeton University.

Nina Murray is a Ukrainian-American poet and translator. She is the author of the poetry collection Glapthorn Circular (LiveCanon Poetry, 2023) and several chapbooks. Her award-winning translations include Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets, and Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe (forthcoming from Deep Vellum). Her translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra was performed at the Omnibus Theatre in London in 2022.

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart Prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She has authored seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards ‘Must Read’ in Poetry, and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest, named to Brilliant Books’ Most Brilliant Books of 2024. Ali Kinsella and Orlowsky’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize and winner of the 2020–2021 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Prize for Translation. They received a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship and were finalists for the 2025 PEN America Literary Award for their translation of Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living published by Lost Horse Press in 2024.

Matvii Smirnov is a Lviv-born, Ukrainian poet based in the United Kingdom. His Ukrainian poetry and English translations have been featured in various Ukrainian and international literary magazines and anthologies, including Dzvin (Lviv), Dnipro (Kyiv), Khreschatyk (Germany), Of Poets & Poetry (US). Matvii is the author of the poetry collection Shibboleth (Шібболет, Kyiv, 2024). Beyond his literary work, he is engaged in industrial innovation, and serves as the founder and director of Shield UA, a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Aliona Vitiaz is an experienced translator, a lifelong fan of sci-fi and fantasy, and an amateur birdwatcher. Born in Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine, she once translated The Hobbit for fun in school and has never stopped since. Having tried her hand at virtually every type of text there is, she finally made her dream come true when she started translating poetry and fiction. This work has become a great source of comfort, helping her withstand the pressure of living in a country viciously attacked by Russia day by day. Her biggest ambitions are to promote Ukrainian fantasy and poetry abroad and, one day, to become a proper cat lady with a nice garden in a peaceful and victorious Ukraine.

Lesia Waschuk is a heritage speaker of Ukrainian who was born in Canada and has had a lifetime of opportunities to act as an interpreter, informally. She is a licensed dentist, regulatory expert, longtime peer reviewer and editorial consultant to a national dental journal. She has written more than sixty articles providing professional guidance on dentistry-related topics. She holds a Master of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and a graduate certificate in creative writing from the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, and has published several creative non-fiction pieces in the Literary Kitchen Collective anthologies On the Fly and Places Like Home. A committed volunteer in the Ukrainian-Canadian community, she has provided editorial assistance for the publication of English-language translations of classic and contemporary Ukrainian literature and stories from life during wartime written by ordinary Ukrainians. She has been learning the craft of literary translation since 2022.

Nataliya Yaroshenko is a ceramic artist and art educator originally from Kharkiv, Ukraine, now residing in Los Angeles. While specialising in ceramics and process art in her professional life, Nataliya also holds a special place in her heart for the power and beauty of words. She is honoured to have collaborated in translating the poems of Maksym Kryvtsov, a talented poet who fought for Ukraine’s freedom. His was one of the remarkable voices tragically lost in this war. Nataliya continues to support her homeland’s efforts for independence and democracy through direct support and education.