He is a writer from Cambridge, Massachusetts with Ukrainian roots. His short fiction has appeared in Sonora Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, and New England Review. Before writing The Sunflower Boys, he taught English to primary schoolers in central Ukraine and worked with refugee families in Europe and the United States.
At Electric Lit Wachman tagged ten Ukrainian books that show the many sides of a nation. One title on the list:
The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse WheelerRead about another entry on the list.
Set during the first years of the war in Donbas, The Orphanage follows Pasha, a Ukrainian-language teacher who must traverse thefrontlines to rescue his thirteen year-old nephew. His nephew is stranded in occupied territory in an internat, an untranslatable Soviet institution halfway between an orphanage and a boarding school. With echoes of Dante’s Inferno, Zhadan documents Pasha’s journey across the war-torn landscape with startling clarity.
Serhiy Zhadan is an unstoppable cultural force—a rock star, a poet, an activist, and one of Ukraine’s foremost novelists. Through The Orphanage, he reminds readers that the war in Ukraine did not emerge ex nihilo; Russia has occupied and tormented southern and eastern Ukraine since 2014.
--Marshal Zeringue
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