Serhiy Zhadan - Novels, Poetry and Non-Fiction (6 books)

* Serhiy Zhadan - Novels, Poetry and Non-Fiction (6 books)

SERHIY VIKTOROVYCH ZHADAN (b. 1974) is an Ukrainian poet, novelist, essayist, musician, translator, and social activist. He is one of the most popular and influential voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature: his poetry and novels are renowned and widely read both at home and abroad. He has won more than a dozen literary awards.

Zhadan’s poetic style and masterful wordplay have led critics to dub his trademark approach "verbal jazz", a description that reflects his unique authorial voice. Zhadan stands as a witness to a time of great social change through the eyes of Ukraine's dispossessed youth. His work explores the changes he has witnessed as a representative of the immediate post-Soviet generation in Ukraine.

His first novel, DEPECHE MODE (2004), depicts Ukrainian youth during the turbulent 1990s. VOROSHILOVGRAD (2010), the Soviet name for Luhansk, draws upon the industrial landscapes of East Ukraine to relate the story of a young man who returns to his native land to protect something that belongs to him. In the nine stories and thirty poems that comprise MESOPOTAMIA (2014), we find ourselves in the newly independent Ukraine, stunned by its grit, its rough backbone—and its tenderness. THE ORPHANAGE (2017) is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine.

His first collection of poems in English, WHAT WE LIVE FOR, WHAT WE DIE FOR (2019), features gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where "every year there’s less and less air."

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Zhadan remained in his hometown of Kharkiv, helping to organize humanitarian aid. His most recent work, SKY ABOVE KHARKIV: DISPATCHES FROM THE UKRAINIAN FRONT (2022), is an intimate account of resistance and survival in those harrowing first four months of the war. The book is at once the testimony of one man entering a new reality and the story of a society fighting for the right to exist.

On 5 March 2022, the Polish Academy of Sciences nominated Zhadan for the Nobel Prize in Literature.


The following books are in ePub and/or PDF format as indicated:

== FICTION ==

* Depeche Mode (Glagoslav, 2013) – ePub
* Mesopotamia (Yale, 2018) – ePub + PDF
* The Orphanage (Yale, 2021) – ePub + PDF
* Voroshilovgrad (Deep Vellum, 2016) – ePub + PDF

== POETRY ==

* What We Live For, What We Die For: Selected Poems (Yale, 2019) – PDF

== NON-FICTION ==

* Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Front (Yale, 2023) – ePub + PDF


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