Sweet Darusya

Maria Matios is a Ukrainian poet, novelist, and official. She was born in the village of Roztoky in the Bukovina region, and presently resides in Kyiv. She authored twelve volumes of fiction and poetry, including the novel Sweet Darusia, and the collections of stories titled The Short Life and Nation. Her prose works have been translated into Russian, Polish, English, Serbian, and Belorussian. Her first poems were published when she was fifteen years old. In 1992 she published her first prose in Kyiv Magazine. Maria Matios bases her books on the unique experiences of her family, whose roots go back as far as 1790. She was the winner of the Book of the Year 2004 prize and of the Taras Shevchenko National Award in 2005 (for her novel Sweet Darusia). In the 2014 Ukrainian election Matios was re-elected as a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament.

Olha Tytarenko is Senior Lector in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. She has co-translated five books with Michael Naydan including Aleksandr Strashny's The Ukrainian Mentality: An Ethno-Psychological, Historical, and Comparative Exploration (ibidem Press, 2024), and Maria Matios' Sweet Darusya: A Tale of Two Villages (2019) and Yuri Vynnychuk's Tango of Death (2019), both with (Spuyten Duyvil Publishers).