Called “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence,” Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex became an international phenomenon when it shot to number one on the Ukrainian bestseller list and remained there throughout the 1990s. The novel is narrated in first-person streams of thought by a sharp-tongued poet with an irreverently honest voice. She is visiting professor of Slavic studies at Harvard and her exposure to American values and behaviors conspires with her yearning to break free from Ukrainian conventions. In her despair over a recently ended affair, she turns her attention to the details of her lover’s abusive behavior. In detailing the power her Ukrainian lover wielded over her, and in admitting the underlying reasons for her attraction to him, she begins to see the chains that have defined her as a Ukrainian woman – and in doing so, exposes and calls into question her country’s culture of fear and repression at the very time that it wrestled its way toward independence.
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Oksana Zabuzhko was born in 1960 in Ukraine. She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University, obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts, and has spent some time in the USA lecturing as a Fulbright Fellow and a Writer-in-Residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and University of Pittsburgh. She has authored seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Among her numerous acknowledgments are the Global Commitment Foundation Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Grant, the Antonovych International Foundation Prize, the Ukrainian National Award, the Order of Princess Olha, and many other national awards.
Angela Dawe is an actor, writer, and audiobook narrator based in the Midwest. Her work as an actor has included roles in theater, film, and television, as well as improv and sketch comedy with such theaters as Second City and the Annoyance. In the literary world, Angela has received multiple awards and nominations for her work as an audiobook narrator, and is a published fiction author herself. She holds a BA in philosophy, so if the writing/performing work dries up, she has something to fall back on.