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. At Cambridge, Shuvalova also taught Ukrainian language. Her research interests lie at the intersection of culture and politics in Eastern Europe. In her doctoral thesis, she explored the complex identities in the communities affected by the war in Donbas through the prism of war songs.

​

As of early 2022, Shuvalova authored five books of poetry, including the bilingual Pray to the Empty Wells published by Lost Horse Press in the US in fall 2019. Her most recent collection stoneorchardwoods (каміньсадліс) (Lviv: Old Lion’s Publishing House, 2020) has been recognized 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. Meanwhile, her new book of poems in Ukrainian titled endsongs (кінечні пісні) is scheduled to appear in print in 2024. Shuvalova’s writing has been widely anthologized and featured in the periodicals in Ukraine and abroad, including Literary Hub, Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, and many others. Her poems have been translated into twenty-five languages.

​

Her work as a translator includes, most recently, translations into Ukrainian of poems by Louise Glück and Alice Oswald. Among her book-length translation projects are Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey (2019) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2016), as well as an unpublished volume of selected poems of Ted Hughes. She is currently  working on the co-translation of Ostap Slyvynsky’s The Winter King (into English) with Vitaly Chernetsky. 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’.

​

Shuvalova has been awarded numerous prizes for poetry and translation, including first prize for poetry in the Smoloskyp Literary Competition (2010) and second place in Stephen Spender / Joseph Brodsky Prize (2012). She has supported English PEN as an expert on Ukrainian translation projects and has been a member of PEN Ukraine since 2020. She has performed her poetry at multiple readings and festivals, including the Oslo International Poetry Festival in 2018. Shuvalova has also taken part in a number of international writing residences and fellowships, including the Hawthornden Castle Fellowship in 2015.

​

Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, she has lived in Greece, the UK, the US, and China. In 2023, she joined the University of Oslo in Norway as a research fellow.