Ali Kinsella
Photo by Mary Kahor
Bio
A resident of western and central Ukraine for nearly five years, Ali Kinsella’s published works include essays, poetry, monographs, and subtitles to films. She won the 2019 Kovaliv Fund Prize for her translation of Taras Prokhasko’s Anna’s Other Days, due out from Harvard Press in 2024. In 2021, she was awarded a Peterson Literary Fund grant to translate Vasyl Makhno’s Eternal Calendar. Her co-translation with Dzvinia Orlowsky from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry, and winner of the 2022 AAUS Prize for Translation. She co-edited Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022), an anthology of short fiction to support Ukrainians during the war.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Ukrainian of the poetry collection Lost in Living by Halyna Kruk. The majority of the poems in Lost in Living were and are being written in real time as the war in Ukraine continues. Many Ukrainian writers, including Kruk, continue to ignore traditional publishing routes and are posting their work to social media where it is sometimes edited publicly. For this reason, the collection is still taking shape, as the work is unpublished and many of its eventual poems have not yet been written. Kinsella will collaborate on this project with Dzvinia Orlowsky, a poet and co-editor of Four Way Books.
Receiving this shocking award gives me the encouragement (and means!) to continue in what is often a very lonely pursuit that sometimes feels like an exercise in convincing others to listen. Working with Dzvinia Orlowsky over the last five years has been a welcome change from what is typically just myself and my screen. Support from the National Endowment for the Arts will help us finish the collection and realize its full potential by getting to meet and collaborate in person for the first time, as well as engage the services of others. We also look forward to being able to spend more time sharing our experiences with and learning from other translators and writers, in addition to promoting the book once it has been published.
Knowing that others see the importance of translating an author such as Halyna Kruk inspires me to believe that this faith could be extended to other important Ukrainian writers. My imagination runs wild with the projects I could pursue next, the publishers I could convince to revitalize long-dormant Ukrainian travelogues and family sagas.
It is devastating that it has taken such human and environmental loss to persuade the rest of the world to pay attention to Ukrainian letters, and now is no time to slow our efforts to amplify often silenced voices. To promote the work of any Ukrainian artist is to participate in the decolonization of literature.
About Halyna Kruk
Halyna Kruk (b. 1974) is a leading poetic voice in western Ukraine and the award-winning author of five books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and four children’s books. For Kruk, the idea that there can be art for art’s sake has become laughable in war.