Juri
Andruchowytsch

Juri Andruchowytsch was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1960. He has been known to a wider audience in Germany since the publication of a translation of his essay collection “Das letzte Territorium” (The Last Territory, 2003) and has made a remarkably successful impression in the German-language feature pages. In a refreshing tone, free of nostalgia, with colourful details, sometimes angry, sometimes ironic, he describes the post-Soviet reality of the Ukraine in the lucid, linguistically brilliant essays of this “poetic non-fiction book” with historical depth: Lvov and Kiev; his home town, the once Galician Stanislau; general traces of ruined Galicia; visible and invisible borders that run through a country on which masses of people have turned their backs to pursue the promises of the West in recent years.

In the Ukraine, Andruchowytsch’s poetry and novels have already made him into a classic writer of contemporary literature. In 1985, the year he published his first book, a collection of poetry entitled “The Sky and the Fields”, he founded the group “Bu-Ba-Bu” together with Viktor Neborak and Oleksandr Irvaniets, which has had considerable influence on Ukrainian literature. From 1989 to 1991, he studied at the Moscow Institute of Literature Maxim Gorki. Following this period in Moscow, he worked for five years as co-editor of the Magazine for Text and Vision Tschetwer. In addition, Andruchowytsch founded the Internet journal Train 76, which owes its name to that of a railway route that connected large areas of Europe before the First World War. In 2004, he published “Mein Europa” in German; a double portrait of a landscape – together with the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk – which they have travelled through and in which they live: Central Europe.

Juri Andruchowytsch has received numerous awards, incl. the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2006.

“Juri Andruchowytsch … writes in such an exciting, far-ranging way about his home country that we are horrified by our own provincialism.” (Ilma Rakusa, Neue Zürcher Zeitung)