War from the Rear

Andriy Lyubka is a Ukrainian poet, essayist, novelist, and translator known for his sharp wit and keen observations on contemporary life. Raised in Vynohradiv, Ukraine, he studied Ukrainian Philology at Uzhhorod National University and later earned a master's degree in Balkan Studies from Warsaw University. Lyubka is the author of multiple poetry collections, short stories, and novels, including Carbide, a vivid exploration of smuggling culture in Ukraine's Zakarpattia region. He also translates literature from Polish, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and English. His essays and commentary appear in leading Ukrainian and international publications such as New Eastern Europe, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Den'. Currently based in Uzhhorod, Lyubka continues to be a significant voice in Ukrainian literature, offering insightful and often humorous perspectives on identity, conflict, and everyday resilience.

Kate Tsurkan is an American writer, editor, and translator based in Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Her co-translation, with Yulia Lyubka, of State of War (Meridian Czernowitz), edited by Evgenia Lopata and Andriy Lyubka, received the 2025 Peterson Literary Fund Translated Book Award. She is a reporter at the Kyiv Independent, where she writes on culture and history and publishes the weekly newsletter Explaining Ukraine with Kate Tsurkan. In 2017 she co-founded Apofenie, an online magazine of Central and Eastern European literature in translation with a particular focus on contemporary Ukrainian writing. Her other book-length co-translations from the Ukrainian include Oleh Sentsov's Diary of a Hunger Striker, Myroslav Laiuk's Bakhmut, Andriy Lyubka's War from the Rear, and Khrystia Vengryniuk's Long Eyes. With Dmytro Kyyan she has translated Lyubko Deresh's Medusa's Gaze, forthcoming from Academic Studies Press. Her writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Harper's, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Trained as a scholar of nineteenth-century French literature at New York University, she works from Ukrainian, Russian, and French.