A citation for the award by Poland’s Zbigniew Herbert Foundation says that Kiyanovska has been honoured for her deeply moving volume of poetry entitled The Voices of Babyn Yar.
It commemorates the victims of the massacre of nearly 34,000 Jews carried out by German forces in September 1941 in Babyn Yar near Kyiv, as well as the victims of an earlier Bolshevik purge and of the Great Famine, whose remains also lie in Babyn Yar.
Ukrainian poet Jurii Andrukhovych, a member of the Herbert Prize jury, has described Kiyanovska as “one of the leading voices of Ukrainian poetry over the last two decades, whose work exerts a great influence on her fellow poets.”
Another member of the jury, Polish poet Tomasz Różycki, has said: “In The Voices of Babyn Yar, Kiyanovska dared achieve the impossible – she endeavoured to give the dead a voice. For the very first time in Ukrainian, this monumental rhyming threnody was written for the victims of the Holocaust: Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Roma, as well as representatives of all other groups and communities, murdered during World War II by Nazi Germany in Babyn Yar. In individual poems we hear the voices of children, women, old people – all those without a voice.”
The Polish version of The Voices of Babyn Yar, in a translation by Adam Pomorski, won the European Poet of Freedom Award, which Kiyanovska collected from the Polish city of Gdańsk in June.
Kiyanovska was born in 1973. She has a degree in Ukrainian studies from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. She has published over a dozen poetry volumes. Her works have been translated into 18 languages. She has also translated verse by the late Polish poets Bolesław Leśmian and Julian Tuwim as well as several living poets of the younger generation.
Kiyanowska will collect the prize at a ceremony in Warsaw on October 27.
The Herbert Literary Award was launched 10 years ago.
Born in 1924, Herbert was one of the most influential 20th-century Polish poets, essayists, and moralists. His most popular works include Struna światła (The Chord of Light), Hermes, pies i gwiazda (Hermes, Dog and Star), Barbarzyńca w ogrodzie (The Barbarian in the Garden), and Pan Cogito (Mr. Cogito).
Zbigniew Herbert, pictured in 1963. Photo: PAP/Cezary Langda
An anti-communist, Herbert gave his wholehearted support to Poland's Solidarity movement in the early 1980s. After the imposition of martial law in the country in December 1981, his poems were recited at clandestine Solidarity meetings.
His works have been translated into 38 languages. He died in 1998.
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