Ivan and Phoebe
2021, Translation-in-Progress Grant Recipient
Ivan and Phoebe
«Іван і Феба»
Author: Oksana Lutsyshyna
Translator: Nina Murray
About the project: "Ivan and Phoebe" won Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko National Prize for Literature in 2021. The novel chronicles the lives of several young people involved in the Revolution on the Granite in 1990. The story is set in Uzhgorod, Kyiv and Lviv. As the characters come to exercise their rights to free speech and protest, something that their upbringing absolutely had not prepared them to do, they must also re-evaluate the norms of marriage, family, and home life. While these initially appear to be spaces of peace and harmony, they are soon revealed to be hot beds of conflict and multigenerational trauma.
"Ivan and Phoebe" is an epic novel (projected 120,000 in English) with a solid historical foundation. The translation requires intense engagement not only with the narrative voice, but also with unique and dialectical speech of many characters and historical facts.