Iryna Shuvalova is a poet, translator, and scholar from Ukraine. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College in the US (2014), where she was a Fulbright scholar, and a PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge (2020), where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar. 

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As of early 2025, Shuvalova has authored five books of poetry in Ukrainian. Her latest book of poems in Ukrainian, titled endsongs (кінечні пісні) and published in 2024, has been described as ‘a future classic’ (Ostap Slyvynsky), with the poet herself praised as ‘one of the brightest stars in the constellation of contemporary Ukrainian poetry’ (Vitaly Chernetsky). Her previous collection stoneorchardwoods (каміньсадліс) (Lviv: Old Lion’s Publishing House, 2020) has been recognised as the poetry book of the year by Ukraine’s Litakcent Prize for Literature and received the Special Prize of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Book Award. She is currently working on her next book, I Don’t Speak This Language (Я не знаю цієї мови), conceived as a joint project with a China-based Ukrainian visual artist Julia Tveritina and to be published in 2026 by Safran in Kyiv.

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Shuvalova’s writing has been widely anthologised and featured in periodicals in Ukraine and abroad, including Literary Hub, Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, and many others. Her poems have been translated into thirty-two languages and published as separate books in English (Pray to the Empty Wells. Lost Horse Press: 2019) and Polish (Niewyrażalne. Krasnogruda: Dwór Miłosza, 2023), with further book-length translations forthcoming in Norwegian, Swedish, and Italian. Pray to the Empty Wells in particular has been described as 'a revelation' by The Observer. 
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Shuvalova herself is an award-winning translator bringing modern and contemporary Ukrainian poetry to English-speaking readers. Her translations won the Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Prize in 2012 (second prize) and were shortlisted for the National Translation Award in the US in 2024 (for Ostap Slyvynsky’s poetry collection Winter King, co-translated with Vitaly Chernetsky, which also won the AAUS Translation Prize). Shuvalova’s translations into English include the Ukrainian modernist classics of poetry, such as Mykola Bazhan, Pavlo Fylypovych, Iurii Klen, Mykola Vinhranovsky, and Mykola Zerov. Meanwhile, among her translations from English into Ukrainian are the poems of Ted Hughes, Louise Glück, and Alice Oswald, as well as Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi (2016). Shuvalova’s translations appeared in Ambit, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poem, and Words Without Borders. In 2009, she co-edited the first anthology of queer literature in Ukraine 120 Pages of ‘Sodom’ and in 2025, co-founded the first queer poetry contest in Ukraine, ‘hol[o]sni!’ that in its very first edition attracted over 100 submissions from all over Ukraine and 12 countries beyond. An important part of her work has been building bridges between the Sinophone world and Ukraine. In 2024-25, she has curated the Ukrainian section of the annual Hong Kong poetry marathon 诗歌24小时 (24 Hours Poetry), bringing the voices of 19 poets from Ukraine to audiences in the Sinosphere.
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Shuvalova won most of Ukraine’s major awards for poetry, including first prize for poetry in the Smoloskyp Literary Competition, the Oles Honchar Prize, the Blahovist Prize, and others. She has supported English PEN as an expert on Ukrainian translation projects in 2017 and has been a member of PEN Ukraine since 2020. She also served as an expert in literature for the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, as well as judging literary and translation prizes, including the Cyclop videopoetry competition and the AAUS Translation Prize. Additionally, she has taught creative writing and translation courses for LitOsvita in Ukraine and the Arvon Foundation in the UK, among others. Shuvalova has performed her poetry at multiple readings and festivals, from the US, the UK and Germany to Mexico and China. Most recently, she was part of the Stockholm International Poetry Festival (2023), the Oslo International Poetry Festival (2024), the Stuttgart Literature Festival (2025) and the Vilnius Poetry Spring International Festival (2025). Shuvalova has also taken part in multiple international writing residences and fellowships, including the Hawthornden Castle (Scotland, 2015), the Chinese European Art Center / CEAC (China, 2024) and the Literary Colloquium Berlin / LCB (Germany, 2025).
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Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, in the past decade, she has been living between Ukraine and other countries, including Greece, the UK, the US, China, and Norway. In 2023, she joined the University of Oslo in Norway (UiO) as a postdoctoral fellow. Her research interests lie at the intersection of culture and politics in Eastern Europe. In her doctoral thesis, Shuvalova explored the complex identities in the communities affected by the Russo-Ukrainian war through the prism of war songs. She has taught Ukrainian language at the University of Cambridge and continues to teach Ukrainian language, culture, politics, and society at the University of Oslo.