UMass Boston

Creative writing; fiction; contemporary fiction

MA, Boston University

Co-recipient of the 2021 Heldt Prize for Translation from AWSS (The Association for Women in Slavic Studies).

Askold Melnyczuk’s book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow, will appear in 2021 from Grand Iota (UK). Chinua Achebe described What Is Told, a New York Times Notable, as “a marvelous novel and proof once again that the novel is not dead wherever it has…meaningful work to do.” His second novel, The Ambassador of the Dead, was selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the LA Times which noted that “Melnyczuk…has brought the great tradition of Russian literature to American soil in a transplant that is a work of art.”

The House of Widows was chosen by the American Libraries Association’s Booklist for an Editor’s Choice Award as one of the outstanding books of 2008. About it Kirkus noted “Melnyczuk’s hallucinatory tale achieves some of the fierce, distracting power of D.H. Lawrence’s masterpiece, Women in Love.”

Co-editor of From Three World, an anthology of Ukrainian writers, he has edited books on Father Daniel Berrigan and the painter Gerald Bergstein, as well as a series of poetry volumes published by Graywolf Press. His published translations include work by Oksana Zabuzhko, Marjana Savka, Bohdan Boychuk, and Ivan Drach. His shorter work, including essays, stories, and reviews, have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Times Literary Supplement (London), The Antioch Review, Irish Pages, The American Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry, The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review and elsewhere.

He’s received a three-year Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction, the McGinnis Award in Fiction, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his contributions to the literary community. As founding editor of Agni he received PEN’s Magid Award for creating “one of America’s, and the world’s, leading literary journals.” Founding editor of Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College, and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

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