Valeriy Shevchuk

Valeriy Oleksandrovych Shevchuk (; 20 August 1939 – 6 May 2025) was a Ukrainian writer.

Early life Shevchuk was born on 20 August 1939 to a family of a shoemaker and a Polish woman by origin. In 1956, wanting to become a geologist, he applied to the Lviv Institute of Forestry but failed the entrance exam. Instead, he went to a technical school, Zhytomyr Technical School №1, and worked at a concrete plant. While attending the technical school, he recalled discovering more about himself by reading Ukrainian literature by Ivan Franko and Dmytro Bahalii, which led him away from geology and toward philology. He then served his mandatory service in the Soviet Armed Forces in Murmansk Oblast within the Russian SFSR. However, just a year later, Valeriy was arrested at the "Ukraina cinema" in Kyiv during a screening of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors alongside a group of Kyiv intellectuals who were protesting the new arrests following the Khrushchev thaw. In 1967, he published his second big work, a collection of stories entitled Sered Tyzhnya (In the Middle of the Week), and he also joined the National Writers' Union of Ukraine (NSPU) during this time. He died following a serious illness a year after it became known he was suffering with diabetes mellitus.

Awards

Valeriy Shevchuk was an Honoured Professor of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and of the National University of Lviv. He was a laureate of the Antonovych Foundation Award and of other numerous literary awards. He is also an honored figure of Polish Culture. His works have been translated into 22 languages.

In 2011, Valeriy Shevchuk Prize was instituted by the Ivan Franko Zhytomyr State University. “The Esplanade 12” (1968) “On a Humble Field” (1983) “A House on a Mountain” (1983) “Three Leaves Behind the Window” (1986), “The Thinking Tree” (1986) “Birds from an Invisible Island” (1989) “The Murrain” (1989) “An Eternal Clock” (1990) “The Woman of Flowers” (1990 – the collection of fairy tales) “Inside the Belly of an Apocalyptic Beast” (1995) “Eye of the Abyss” (1996) “The Snakewoman” (1998) “Silver Milk” (2002) “The Vanishing Shadows. A Family Chronicle.” (2002) “The Cossack State: Studies to the History of Establishment of the Ukrainian State” (1995) “The Roxelany Muse: the Ukrainian Literature of 16th to 18th Centuries in 2 Volumes” (2005) “The Known and the Unknown Sphinx. Hryhorii Skovoroda in the Modern View” (2008)

He compiled several collections of love poetry of the 16th to 19th centuries and translated them into modern literary language, such as "Songs of Cupid" (1984) and heroic poetry of the 9th and 10th centuries “Field of Mars” in 2 volumes (1989), “The Chronicle of Samiylo Velychko” (two-volume, 1991), etc.

Publications in English The Meek Shall Inherit... (trans. of Na poli smyrennomu). Trans. by Viktoriia Kholmohorova. Kyiv: Dnipro Publishers, 1989.