Transpoesie - Poets

Olena Herasymiuk (born 1991 in Kiev, Ukraine) is a poet and former military medic whose work combines literature, history, and lived experience of war. She refused the Ukrainian President’s Prize for Poetry in 2013 in protest against the Yanukovych regime and has since become a leading voice of a younger generation of Ukrainian poets exploring questions of self, nation, and memory. With Denis Polishchuk, she co-founded Rozstriljanij Kalender (“Execution Calendar”), documenting Soviet repression of Ukrainian intellectuals, and in 2014 she joined a protest on Kyiv’s Independence Square to honor writers executed in Sandarmokh. In 2017 she enlisted with the Hospitaliers medical battalion in Donbas, later taking part in the 2019 operation to capture Volodymyr Tsemakh, linked to the downing of flight MH17. Ukraine has awarded her the medal “For Saving Lives,” and her 2017 book Rozstrilny Kalendar and her recent poetry collection Prison Song have received wide acclaim.