“Donezk Girl": Reading and talk with Tamara Duda

Poster >

Language: German and Ukrainian

Speakers: 

- Tamara Duda (writer, Kyiv, Ukraine) 

- Alexander Kratochvil (translator, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany)

- Lukas Joura (Viadrina Center of Polish and Ukrainian Studies in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany)

Join us for a special reading and discussion with the Ukrainian writer Tamara Duda and translators Alexander Kratochvil and Lukas Joura. The book offers a literary examination of the beginning of the war in the Donbas in 2014 and sheds light on the fates and experiences of the people in the region. The author and the translators will share their perspectives on the novel, the challenges of translation and the importance of literature during the conflict. 

About the book

In her novel “Donezk Girl”, Tamara Duda tells the story of a young woman in Donezk whose life as an artisan is thrown off course by the Russian invasion in spring 2014. She must make a decision: Flee and leave everyone and everything behind? Or stand up to the invasion? 

The novel vividly depicts how Donezk changed in 2014, at first imperceptibly, then increasingly irrevocably. How people, buildings, and entire districts were destroyed, how looting and violence became commonplace, how Russian occupiers advanced further and further and how the locals reacted. Never have the events of 2014 in eastern Ukraine been told so honestly, so authentically, so movingly, so harrowingly and from the perspective of a woman. 

Tamara Duda's “Donezk Girl” was voted “BBC Book of the Year” in Ukraine in 2019, the year of its publication. The author was awarded the Taras Shevchenko Prize, Ukraine's most prestigious literary prize, for the novel in 2022. The novel was translated into German by Annegret Becker, Lukas Joura and Alexander Kratochvil.

Tamara Duda (pseudonym Tamara Horicha Sernja)

Tamara Duda was born in Kyiv in 1976. She studied journalism at Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University. From 2003 to 2005, she studied at the International University of Kyiv. She then began a career as a translator, mainly from English into Ukrainian. 

In 2014, following the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Tamara Duda volunteered for the joint forces operation in the Donbas. When she witnessed Ukrainian soldiers' eyes being injured by shrapnel, she launched a campaign to equip the Ukrainian army with tactical glasses, receiving support from the US government and others. During her time on the front line, which lasted until 2016, Duda reported on her experiences on Facebook under the pseudonym Tamara Horikha Zernya.

Alexander Kratochvil

Alexander Kratochvil studied Slavic Studies, Ethnology, German Studies and Eastern European History in Munich, Freiburg, Brno and Lviv. Since October 2022, he has been a research assistant for Ukrainian and Czech literature at the Chair of Slavic Philology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Alexander Kratochvil translates from Ukrainian and Czech, in particular works by Valerian Pidmohylnyi, Yuri Andrukhovych, Oksana Sabushko, Yuri Vynnychuk, Serhiy Zhadan, Oleksandr Irvanez, Sofia Andrukhovych and Pavel Šrut.

Lukas Joura

Lukas Michael Joura studied Slavic Studies and Social Sciences in Berlin, Cambridge (UK), Kyiv, Lviv and Toronto, as well as European Studies at the postgraduate level at the College of Europe in Natolin (Warsaw, Poland). He currently works at the Viadrina Center of Polish and Ukrainian Studies at the European University Viadrina at Frankfurt (Oder) and as a translator of academic and literary texts from Ukrainian.