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Kate Tsurkan

Culture Reporter

Kate Tsurkan is a reporter at the Kyiv Independent who writes mostly about culture-related topics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Her newsletter Explaining Ukraine with Kate Tsurkan, which focuses specifically on Ukrainian culture, is published weekly by the Kyiv Independent and is partially supported by a generous grant from the Nadia Sophie Seiler Fund. The U.S. publisher Deep Vellum published her co-translation of Ukrainian author Oleh Sentsov’s Diary of a Hunger Striker in 2024. Some of her other writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harpers, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Apofenie Magazine.

k.tsurkan@kyivindependent.com

Articles

Culture

Returning home, photographer Yelena Yemchuk finds beauty in a country at war

by Kate Tsurkan
There was no doubt for photographer Yelena Yemchuk that upon returning to Ukraine, she would encounter the pain and loss that comes with the day-to-day reality of Russia's full-scale war — but she wasn't quite ready for how much love there was to go around, too. "It's this understanding of what life is, the understanding of what love is, the understanding of human relationships, and this appreciation for the moment," Yemchuk told the Kyiv Independent. "It's the most beautiful thing I've ever e
Culture

When will Russia attack next? Some Ukrainians turn to tarot readers to find out

by Kate Tsurkan
The viewer count ticks upward — dozens, then hundreds, sometimes nearly a thousand. Just about everyone has tuned in for the same reason: to hear Tetya (Auntie) Fania’s latest predictions about the threat of Russian attacks against Ukrainian cities. “(Let’s look at) Kyiv in November,” she says during a recent broadcast, picking cards from a shuffled deck. “There could be problems with resources beyond electricity, gas, and the like. There will be serious water problems in Kyiv…Maybe rolling bla
Culture

'Bring Ukraine more weapons' — author Andriy Lyubka on cultural diplomacy's main wartime role

by Kate Tsurkan
When the full-scale invasion began, Andriy Lyubka struggled to write. A celebrated Ukrainian writer and translator, he turned instead to fundraising, logistics, and delivering used cars to the front for soldiers' needs. Yet somewhere between non-stop volunteer work and battling with exhaustion that comes from it, he began to see that even literature — words, sentences, imagination — could also serve Ukraine's cause, albeit in a less immediate way. His volunteer work led him to write a book of
Opinion

Culture is not neutral: The troubling presence of Russia’s Eksmo in Frankfurt

by Kate Tsurkan
There were two questions lingering over conversations among people at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair: Where was the stand of the Russian publisher Eksmo located, and why were they even allowed to be there nearly four years into Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine? I will never forget the look of horror and disgust of one exiled Russian author, who is fiercely pro-Ukrainian and quietly attended many of Ukraine's events at the book fair with a visible awe at this year's event program, when h
The collage of the “The City” by Valerian Pidmohylnyi and the photo of Kyiv between approximately 1890 and 1900.
Culture

This Ukrainian author was executed by the Soviets, but his legendary novel ‘The City’ lives on

by Kate Tsurkan
Overwhelmed by the buzzing nightlife of Khreshchatyk Street in central Kyiv, Stepan Radchenko, the despondent protagonist of Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s novel “The City,” looks up at the moon for solace and reminds himself: “The city must be conquered, not despised!” A defining novel of 20th-century Ukrainian literature, "The City" has now been brought to English-language readers by Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute in a fresh translation by Maxim Tarnawsky. The novel traces Radchenko's uneasy

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