Svetlana Lavochkina

Svetlana Lavochkina (; born 1973) is a Ukrainian She did not directly experience antisemitism in her childhood. Today she sees herself as a global citizen and is proud of her Jewish origins. Lavochkina belongs to the Jewish community in Leipzig. She has taught her two sons what it means to be Jewish.

In addition to her work as a writer and translator, Lavochkina works as an English teacher at the Waldorf School in Leipzig and writes for the English-language international literary magazine LeipGlo.

In 2025 Lavochkina taught poetry translation at the Translating Ukraine Summer Institute, held from 7 to 18 July at the Ossolineum in Wrocław. The programme is co-organised, among others, by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

Works Lavochkina has translated Ukrainian and Russian poetry into English, including poems by Osip Mandelstam, Vasyl Holoborodko, Dmytro Kremin, Mykola Bazhan, Lyuba Yakimchuk and Borys Khersonsky. She has written short stories and poems published in British and American anthologies and literary magazines. Her success as a writer began with her novella Dam Duchess. She submitted the unpublished manuscript to a literary competition run by the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company and won second prize in 2013.

The novella Dam Duchess was published by Whisk(e)y Tit in 2018 and translated into German by Diana Feuerbach under the title Die rote Herzogin in 2022. It is set in Zaporizhzhia in the late 1920s during the construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station and serves as a prequel to Puschkins Erben, the German translation of Lavochkina's debut novel Zap. In the Leipziger Internet Zeitung, Die rote Herzogin was described as an "overture" to Puschkins Erben; the review highlighted the satirical portrayal of Stalinism during the construction of the Dnieper dam. The title Zap refers to the English abbreviation of Zaporizhzhia.

Zap, published in German translation by Diana Feuerbach under the title Puschkins Erben, is set in Zaporizhzhia in the 1970s. Lavochkina depicts the coexistence of Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Cossack and Roma families, with the Jewish families Winter, Knoblauch and Katz at the centre of the narrative. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reviewer Christiane Pöhlmann wrote that Lavochkina traced the atmosphere of the Brezhnev era, marked by dreariness and provincial narrowness. According to Pöhlmann, the novel addresses antisemitism, misogyny, the silence surrounding the Stalinist period and the denigration of the province in a vivid literary picture; beneath its entertaining surface, it tells a serious story of shattered dreams and life plans.

Lavochkina's novel in verse Carbon: Song of Crafts was published by Lost Horse Press in 2020. The work is written in polyphonic verse and deals with the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk against the background of industrial history, post-Soviet society and the war in the Donbas. Diana Feuerbach's German translation was published by Voland & Quist in 2024 under the title Carbon. Ein Lied von Donezk. In 2022, the Ukrainian self-translation of Carbon won second prize at the Lviv literary award "The Winged Lion".