Precursor

Vasyl Shevchuk (1932-1999) was born into a farming family in Barashi, Zhytomyr Province, Ukraine. After graduating in Philology from Kyiv State University, he worked as a script editor at the Dovzhenko Film Studios and then later for the newspaper Literaturna Ukraina. Fired from his job after he stepped up to defend a colleague, he subsequently had problems publishing his works for almost a decade in the 1970s for not conforming to the line of the Communist party.In the 1950s he began to be published as a poet, but then turned to prose in the 1960s. The novel Precursor (1969, 1972; in Russian, 1972), about the life of the Ukrainian philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda, was published to wide acclaim, and this inspired the author to pen a series of historical novels, among them Pobratymy (1972, 1982, 2021), published in English as Blood Brothers (1980), and two novels about Taras Shevchenko - Son of Freedom (Syn voli, 1984) and Thorny World (Ternovyi svit, 1986). The novel Passions for Mykolay (Strasti za Mykolaiem), about the composer Mykola Lysenko, appeared posthumously in 2007 and was republished in 2021.Vasyl Shevchuk lived and worked in Kyiv. He was legendary for his style of writing - he would first create the entire text in his head, and then commit it to paper, making almost no corrections to the manuscript.Republished again in 2021, Precursor has been included in the Ukrainian school curriculum.

Born in a working-class suburb of Melbourne, Australia in 1954, Yuri Tkacz grew up speaking no English until he entered school. A warm love for Ukraine and its literature led him to abandon his profession as an engineer, and in 1979 he began to translate Ukrainian authors into English full-time. His published translations include works by a diverse group of authors, such as Igor Kaczurowskyj, Oles Honchar, Anatoly Dimarov, Valeriy Shevchuk, Sergij Kariuk, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Yuri Yanovsky, and Borys Antonenko-Davydovych. He lived and worked in Canada in the early 1980s and in Ukraine in the early 1990s, but has now returned to Melbourne. His translations of Hardly Ever Otherwise by Maria Matios, Hard Times by Ostap Vyshnia, The Lawyer from Lychakiv Street by Andriy Kokotiukha, Precursor by Vasyl Shevchuk, and Boryslav in Flames by Ivan Franko have all been published by Glagoslav Publications.