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Poet and Translator
Poet and Translator
Svetlana Lavochkina (Gitin) is a writer of fiction and translator of Ukrainian and Russian poetry. Her work was published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in the US and Britain. She was shortlisted for the Million Writers Award in 2010.
Born and educated in Eastern Ukraine, Svetlana currently lives in Germany with her husband and two sons. She is co-founder and president of Leipzig Writers, a non-profit organization promoting international literary projects.
She is the author of the long poem, Carbon: Song of Crafts (Lost Horse Press, 2019). She is the translator, along with Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky of Lyuba Yakimchuk's volume of poetry Apricots of Donbas (Lost Horse Press, 2021).
Donetsk, the black gem of Ukraine—Eden and Sodom in one, a stew steaming with coal fever, Manifest Destiny of Europe‘s east: the reader is sent onto a double Odyssey of two adventurers, the fiery blacksmith Alexander and the elusive linguist Lisa, whose paths are destined to cross on the cusp of the war in the Donbas. Only one of them fathoms that their encounter goes far beyond its face-value purpose.
A thriller, a romance, a CV, a rose of historical winds, a song of crafts, an ontology of Eastern-Ukrainian mind in one, Lavochkina's Carbon is told in polyphonic verse—a prayer for the beloved, anguished city, Donetsk.
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