Best Literary Translations redefines the canon of global literatures in English translation, showcasing the brave and brilliant work of contemporary translators and editors.

Set during the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion, Rafeyenko’s play explores survival, identity, and connection in a community trapped between Bucha and Borodianka.

With echoes of Ukrainian and global literary voices, Signals of Being is a dramatic meditation on war and belonging.

The realism and mastery of the word in this novel immerses the reader in the story of Stepan Radchenko, a young man from the provinces, who moves to Kyiv and achieves literary success through romantic encounters with women. Pidmogylnyi’s prose reveals the main protagonist’s psyche through action rather than introspection, and combines French literary influence with Freudian depth and existential uncertainty.

Set in Kyiv—a city central to Ukrainian identity—The City reflects the tensions of Ukrainization, Soviet bureaucracy, and the chaotic brilliance of 1920s literary life. It’s a novel about ambition, alienation, and the unpredictable paths of human desire.

This powerful volume brings together three of his early masterpieces: Anna’s Other Days, FM Galicia, and The UnSimple.

Anna’s Other Days is a quartet of experimental stories that blur the lines between memory and narrative, action and contemplation. Through fragmentary prose and philosophical depth, Prochasko explores in his stories how participation in a narrative, or part of it, captures one’s being.

With FM Galicia, Prokhasko adopts a peculiar form for presenting his writings, which is based on a collaboration between the writer and Ivano-­Frankivsk radio station Radio-­Vezha (Radio-­Tower) for which he did a daily reading of a one- or two-page text he had written. This program resulted in 46 short texts that were published as FM Galicia in 2001 by Lileia-­NV. These texts offer personal reflections on topics including, among other things, Prokhasko’s family, his days in the Soviet army, botany, cultural and religious figures, cities, and mountains.

The UnSimple is a novel that tells the story of an insulated community living in the fictional Carpathian mountain resort town of Yalivets in the first half of the twentieth century. It is a place with its own unique, artistic form of democracy, where a special screenwriting institute produces a play written by the people to guide their government’s actions, and many languages are spoken and understood by everyone, and everyone is allowed to speak their own language. In the novel, birth—not death—marks the end of a story.

For lovers of literary experimentation, Ukrainian culture, and philosophical prose, Earth Gods will be a true revelation!

Crimean Fig / Qirim Inciri: Contemporary Crimean Tatar Poetry and Fiction features stories and poems, written by contemporary Crimea Tatar writers and poets, which are shadowed by history. Inevitably, they reflect the traumas endured by Crimean Tatars over the last three and a half centuries. They further chronicle the complex process of a population’s efforts at reintegration into an ancestral land from which they’d been exiled over more than half a century. One hears, in both the stories and poems, a cultural and national pride, love for a land of stunning natural beauty, and a longing for the stability of peace.

This novel is about being human in the modern world and tells the story of Yora, an immigrant from Ukraine to the United States.

A gentle soul with a keen sense of human relationships’ nuances, Yora falls in love with Sebastian, a charming acquaintance who hints at a deep connection between them. But their relationship ends, sending her into a period of despair and grief.

Filled with mystical allusions, Love Life is a compelling story of self-discovery amid the challenges of adapting to a new life.

Brothers Anton and Tolik return to bury their mother. But Russia’s war and the activities of the separatists turn this mundane task into a logistical and ideological challenge. The brothers and other village residents have to overcome isolation and a lack of light and water. The only fragile hope for a ceasefire is the so-called harvest truce.

Zhadan skillfully weaves the rhythms of life—birth, death, planting, harvesting—into a reality where war devalues them. What should be sacred becomes insignificant, and the play’s characters must fight the war’s dehumanizing impact.

And so A Harvest Truce is more than just a family story; it is a mirror that reflects the cost of war and the resilience of those who experience it.

In this title, Lesia Ukrainka, using the prism of classical mythology and intertextual practice, draws attention to the problems of colonialism and cultural enslavement, patriarchy and the enslavement of women, as well as the dilemma of the visionary writer who sees the truth along with the consequences, but, like the archetypal Cassandra, is powerless to convey it to his contemporaries and compatriots.

Having received significant critical acclaim upon publication in Ukrainian, this work is also strongly autobiographical and a form of Ukrainka’s implicit self-projection into the new Ukrainian cultural canon. Presented here in a contemporary, sophisticated English translation attuned to psychological nuance, this play is sure to attract the attention of the modern-day reader interested in Ukrainian literature and culture.

Written in diary form, Olena Stiazhkina’s book tells the story of events in and around Donetsk during the Russian invasion and occupation of 2014. In this personal account, she documents the first bloody chapter of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

This diary records events from March 2, 2014, when the first wave of pro-Russian protests swept across eastern Ukraine after Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, to August 18, 2014, the day a convoy of civilian Ukrainian refugees was deliberately destroyed by Russian troops.

Along with her story, Stiazhkina also shares her observations of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, doing so with wry humor, dry wit, and sarcasm.

“My name is Olena Stiazhkina. I was born and raised in Donetsk…
In March 2014, Russians came into Donetsk and Luhansk—or rather, they drove in from Russian oblasts just across the border—dressed up as “protesters.” In April, the Russians were no longer cautious or circumspect; they came in as armed special forces. In August, before the battle of Ilovaisk, Russians came in openly, as regular soldiers.
The catastrophe of occupation unfolded gradually, hour by hour, day by day. That’s probably why, at first, we couldn’t believe it; then we couldn’t stop it. For the entire world, this part of the Russians’ war against Ukraine was invisible, hidden behind the smoke screen of a crudely cobbled-together “suffering people of Donbas.”
We too were invisible: all of us who woke up one fine morning as Ukrainians.”

Ivan and Phoebe chronicles the lives of several young people involved in the Ukrainian student protests of the 1990s—otherwise known as the Revolution on Granite or the First Maidan and investigates the difficulties and absurdities of a society swiftly shifting from subjugation to revolution to post-Soviet rule.