Lyuba Yakimchuk is a poet, screenwriter, playwright, born 1985 in Pervomaisk Luhanska oblast, and currently living in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Apricots of Donbas, which is about people surviving a war and received the International Poetic Award of the Kovalev Foundation (NYC, USA.) Her new play The Wall was produced at the Ivan Franko National Academic DramaTheater, the largest and the oldest Ukrainian theatre. LyubaYakimchuk has received a number of literary awards, including the International Slavic Poetic Award, the Bohdan-Ihor Antonych Prize and Smoloskyp Prize, three of Ukraine’s most prestigious awards for young poets. She has also received Ukrainian National Film Award Golden Dziga in the category The Best Documentary for the documentary House of WORD, 2018 and Ukrainian National Award Grand Coronation in the category The Best Screenplays, 2022.
Svetlana Lavochkina is a Ukrainian-born novelist and poetry translator residing in Leipzig, Germany. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in the US and Britain. She was shortlisted for the Million Writers Award in 2010.