User:ElizBuga/Oksana Zabuzhko

Born 19 September 1960 in Lutsk, Ukraine. The writer's father, Stefan (Stepan) Ivanovych Zabuzhko (1926-1983) was a teacher, literary critic, and translator, the first to translate the stories of the Czech composer and writer Ilja Hurník into Ukrainian, and was repressed during Stalin's regime.

According to Zabuzhko, she received her philological education at home. The repressions against the Ukrainian intelligentsia that began in September 1965 forced the family to leave Lutsk, and since 1968 she has lived in Kyiv.

Zabuzhko studied philosophy at the Kyiv University, where she also completed her doctorate in aesthetics in 1987. In 1992, she taught at Penn State University as a visiting writer. Zabuzhko won a Fulbright scholarship in 1994 and taught Ukrainian literature at Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh. To date, Zabuzhko works at the Hryhori Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Zabuzhko heard about the Russo Ukrainian War on February 24th, 2022, the day it began, but Zabuzhko was in Warsaw at the time. Not knowing when she could come home put Zabuzhko in a new dilemma. She had previously been engaged with political talk in Ukraine. Many of her novels explore more controversial topics such as sex, specifically aiming to diversify and amplify voices of women.

8 March 2022 Zabuzhko became the first person who is neither an EU citizen nor an official to address a plenary session of the European parliament in Strasbourg.On International Women's Day, Zabuzhko addressed the European Parliament to describe the impact of the war on Ukraine and the impact of the war on women and children in Ukraine. "I am here to tell you, as a writer who knows something about language, that it is already a war, not just a local conflict," said Zabuzhko[1].Zabuzhko continues to frequently speaks out against the Russo Ukrainian War.