Serhiy Zhadan

Serhiy Viktorovych Zhadan (, ; born 23 August 1974) is a Ukrainian poet, novelist, musician, translator, and social activist. He has been a member of the ska band Zhadan i Sobaky since 2008.

In early June 2024, Zhadan posted on his Facebook page that he had joined the 13th "Khartia" Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine, which has been in active combat. Based on the book, Yaroslav Lodygin wrote and directed the 2018 film The Wild Fields.

Zhadan has published 12 books of poetry and 7 novels, and he has won more than a dozen literary awards. In 2008, the Russian translation of his novel Anarchy in the UKR made the shortlist of the National Bestseller Prize. It was also a contender for Book of the Year at the 2008 Moscow International Book Exhibition. In 2009, he won the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski Literary Prize. Voroshylovhrad won him the BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year award in 2010, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in Switzerland in 2014, the BBC Ukrainian Book of the Decade award in 2014, the Award of the President of Ukraine, and Ukrainian Book of the Year in 2016.

From 2016 to 2019, Zhadan was a member of the Taras Shevchenko National Award Committee of Ukraine.

Zhadan has translated poetry from German, English, Belarusian, and Russian, from such poets as Paul Celan and Charles Bukowski. His own works have been translated into German, English, Dutch, Estonian, French, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Georgian, Belarusian, Russian, Hungarian, Armenian, and Czech.

His translated poetry has appeared in Ambit, Asymptote, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, The Manchester Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry International, Poetry International Web, Plume, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

In August 2024, Zhadan was featured reading a poem in a TV commercial for McDonald's in Ukraine. He participated in the 2004 Orange Revolution. He has repeatedly expressed sympathy for anarchists.

In 2013, he was a member of the coordination council of Euromaidan Kharkiv. In the aftermath of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, he was assaulted by pro-Russian demonstrators outside the Kharkiv administration building.

When asked, Zhadan has described his political commitments in the following manner:

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Zhadan remained in Kharkiv, helping to organize humanitarian aid. In June 2024, he posted on his Facebook page that he had joined the 13th Khartiia Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine.

Critical reception

Rostislav Melnikov and Yuriy Tsaplin of the New Literary Review wrote in 2007:

Zhadan's prose is so poetic, his free verse so prosaic. It is difficult to assign a genre to his work: memoir, travelogue, timely or untimely meditation — or a mixture of all these, centered on the themes my generation and our epoch.

Kirill Ankudinov, writing for Vzglyad.ru in June 2008, said:

There is no summarizing the spicy, hot, sweet, vicious improvisations of Serhiy Zhadan — this is verbal jazz. When you read him, you fear for contemporary Russian literature: of those now writing in the Russian language, there is none among them who is so infernally free (and above all, free from "writerly" prose, from the tendency to "produce an impression").

In March 2022, the Polish Academy of Sciences nominated Zhadan for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Works

Poetry Quotations (Цитатник), (1995) General Judas (Генерал Юда), (1995) Pepsi (Пепсі), (1998) The Very Best Poems, Psychedelic Stories of Fighting and Other Bullshit: Selected Poems, 1992–2000 (Вибрані поезії), (2000) Ballads about War and Reconstruction (Балади про війну і відбудову), (2001) The History of Culture at the Beginning of This Century (Історія культури початку століття), (2003) UkSSR (У.Р.С.Р.), (2004) Maradona (Марадона), (2007) Ethiopia (Ефіопія), (2009) Lili Marlene (Лілі Марлен), (2009) Firearms and Knives (Вогнепальні й ножові), (2012) Life of Maria (Життя Марії), (2015) Templars (Тамплієри), (2016) Antenna (Aнтена), (2018) List of Ships (Список кораблів), (2019) Psalm to Aviation (Псалом авіації), (2021) What We Live for, What We Die For: Selected Poems (2019) How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poems (2023)

Prose Big Mac (Біґ Мак; short story collection), (2003) Depeche Mode (Депеш Мод), (2004); Glagoslav Publications Limited, (2013), Anarchy in the UKR, (2005) Anthem of Democratic Youth (Гімн демократичної молоді), (2006) Big Mac² (Біґ Мак²; short story collection), (2007) Voroshilovgrad (Ворошиловград), (2010); Deep Vellum Publishing, (2016), Big Mac and Other Stories (Біґ Мак та інші історії), (2011) Mesopotamia (Месопотамія; nine stories and thirty poems), (2014) The Orphanage (Інтернат), (2017)

Translated into English How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poems translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps. Foreword by Ilya Kaminsky, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023) Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Front translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes, 2023 The Orphanage, translated by Reilly Costigan‑Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, (Yale University Press, 2021) A New Orthography: Poems, Sandpoint, Idaho: Lost Horse Press, 2020. What We Live for, What We Die For: Selected Poems translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Mesopotamia prose translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes & Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler; poetry translated by Viralna Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Voroshilovgrad translated by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler and Reilly Costigan-Humes, (Dallas: Deep Velum, 2016) Depeche Mode translated by Miroslav Shkandrij (London: Glagoslav Publications, 2013).

Awards BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year award – Voroshylovhrad (2010) BBC Ukrainian Book of the Decade award – Voroshylovhrad (2014) Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (2022) Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2025)