IVAN MALKOVYCH

Poet and publisher IVAN MALKOVYCH was born on May 10, 1961 in Nyzhnii Bereziv (Ivano-Frankivsk oblast, Ukraine). He graduated from the violin class of the Ivano-Frankivsk Music Institute (1980) and from the philological faculty of Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University. Malkovych has been a member of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine since 1986.

At age 19, Malkovych was voted best young poet in a clandestine vote among several hundred Ukrainian writers. The publication of his first poetry collection was lauded by the legendary Ukrainian poet Lina Kostenko, who wrote: “Each of his poetry collections would become a phenomenon of literature discourse...The neomodern poetry of Ivan Malkovych became an example of the generous taste of ‘new wave’ poetics.” (Mala ukraïnska entsyklopediia aktualnoï literatury).

Malkovych, who lives and works in Kyiv, is the author of seven poetry collections: Bilyi kamin (White Stone, 1984), Kliuch (The Key, 1988), Virshi (Poems, 1992), Z ianholom na plechi (With an Angel on My Shoulder, 1997), Virshi na zymu (Winter Poems, 2006), Vse poruch (All Is Near, 2011) and Podorozhnyk (The Traveler, 2016).

The poetry of Ivan Malkovych has been translated into English, German, Italian, Russian, Polish, Bengali, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Georgian, Slovak, and Slovenian.

In 1992, Malkovych founded the first privately owned Ukrainian publisher of children’s books, A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA. He is the editor, compiler, author, and translator of several dozen children’s books. It has been suggested that he “is maniacally devoted to the idea of ‘the Ukrainian book of special quality’” (Knyzhnyk-review, no. 1, 2002).

Ivan Malkovych’s events in the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series, entitled All Is Near, took place in October 2011.