Yuliia Iliukha's My Women, translated from Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv, is an urgent and poignant story collection of women confronted by the countless brutalities of war. It locates the voices and devastating experiences of those who have been silenced, those who have lost loved ones, those who have fought and persevered, and those who have broken down. Through poetic repetition, the nameless protagonists, "My Women," bring succinct and emotionally charged stories that evoke life during war in Ukraine with an intensity that is at times excruciatingly difficult yet deeply moving.
Yuliia Iliukha is a Ukrainian poet, writer, and journalist. She is the author of two novels, The Eastern Syndrome and Zero, short story collection The Sky Catchers. Teach Me to Dream, poetry collections Graphomaniac Poems and Das letzte Ahornblatt, and several children's books. Her poetry and prose have been translated into English, German, Italian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Catalan, Polish, Swedish, Portuguese, and French. Iliukha has received many awards, including 128 LIT's 2023 International Chapbook Prize. She is a writer-in-residence at Internationales Haus der Autor:innen in Graz, Austria. Since 2014, when Russia unleashed war against Ukraine, she has been actively involved in volunteering. Together with her friend, she assembled over 500 individual tactical medical kits for Ukrainian soldiers.
Hanna Leliv is a 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. In 2023-24, Hanna was a translator-in-residence at Princeton University.
"'This woman buried her son in a vegetable patch' – Here is a book that makes music of conscience, that finds rhythm in a time of fear, that offers language in a silence after air raids and builds a raft of words to try to sail out of the bombed-out city. How do we sail out of bombed-out cities? By air, by feet? By digging underground tunnels? I don't know. The war that some say is going on for two years now, the war that some say is going on for decades now, the war that some say is going on for centuries now, that war is here. And so is this bit of music, wrapped in words, offering us a rhythm we can breathe to, set our days to. And for that, I am grateful." - Ilya Kaminsky
"Through poetic vignettes narrated by anonymous women, Yuliia Iliukha creates a strikingly multi-faceted and intimate portrait of the experience of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. These highly individual snapshots are painfully rich in visceral and immediate detail, while following the large-scale political drama of the war as documented and reported in the media. Evocative of work by Svetlana Alexievich (such as The Unwomanly Face of War) and beautifully translated by Hanna Leliv, Iliukha's stories quite literally bring the war home—as she writes of 'her women': 'Now they are yours, too.'" - Ainsley Morse
"Using poetic language, My Women reverberates the echoes and pains of the many women affected by this very sad war between Russia and Ukraine. Through repetitions and allusions, the delicate and sensitive prose touches us deeply. A beautiful and necessary read." - Jacques Fux
