Author

Askold Melnyczuk has published four novels and a book of stories. What Is Told (Faber, 1994) was the first commercially published work of fiction in English to highlight the Ukrainian refugee experience and was named a New York Times notable book. Other novels have been selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the American Library Association Booklist Editors’ Choice. His selected poems, The Venus of Odesa, appeared from Mad Hat. A book of selected nonfiction, With Madonna in Kyiv: Why Literature Still Matters (More than Ever), will be published by Harvard in 2026. He has edited a book of essays about Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and is coeditor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of 1980s Ukrainian writers, as well as the first anthology of contemporary fiction and poetry by Crimean Tatars (2025). He’s the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Three Year Award in Fiction, the Heldt Prize for translation, and the George Garrett Award from AWP for his work in the literary community. Individual poems, stories, essays, and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Founding editor of AGNI—for which he received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing—and Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, and Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.