Our Others

Our Others: Stories of Ukrainian Diversity is an award-winning exploration of both the histories and personal stories of fourteen ethnic minority groups living within the boundaries of present-day Ukraine: Czechs and Slovaks, Meskhetian Turks, Swedes, Romanians, Hungarians, Roma, Jews, ‘Liptaks’, Gagauzes, Germans, Vlachs, Poles, Crimean Tatars, and Armenians. Based on a combination of academic research, fieldwork, and interviews, Olesya Yaremchuk’s literary reportages paint realistic, thoughtful, and historically informed depictions of how these various groups arrived in Ukraine and how they have fared within the country’s borders. Accompanied by vivid photographs that bring the reportages to life, Our Others is in some respects a chronicle of the myriad voluntary and forced migrations that have rolled through Ukraine for centuries. Simultaneously, the book offers a tender—and timely—study of the little islands of cultural diversity in Ukraine that have survived the Soviet steamroller of planned linguistic, cultural, and religious unification and that deserve acknowledgement in Ukraine’s broader cultural identity.



The volume’s contributors are: Marta Barnych (contributing co-author), Anton Semyzhenko (contributing co-author), Ostap Slyvynsky (foreword)



Olesya Yaremchuk is an acclaimed Ukrainian author and journalist focusing on travel anthropology, cultural and national identity, and the frontier. She holds a degree in journalism from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled Travel Anthropology in the Literary Reportages of Joseph Roth, was completed in 2018 jointly at this same institution and the University of Vienna, where she held an OeAD Research Fellowship. Yaremchuk has served as the editor-in-chief of the Choven Publishing House, a Ukrainian press specializing in reportage and documentary literature, and has contributed as a journalist to various publications both in Ukraine and abroad. She is a winner of the Samovydets Literary Reportage Award and the LitAccent of the Year Award, both in Ukraine, as well as a finalist of the ADAMI Media Prize and the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Award.







Contributing authors:



Marta Barnych is a Ukrainian graphic designer, artist, and journalist.



Anton Semyzhenko is a journalist and editor. In 2018, he received the Honor of the Profession Journalism Award in Ukraine.



The author of the foreword:



Dr. Ostap Slyvynsky is a Ukrainian poet, translator, and literary critic, who currently teaches Eastern European literature at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.







Translators:



Zenia Tompkins is an American literary translator and the founder of the Tompkins Agency for Ukrainian Literature in Translation (TAULT), a nonprofit literary agency and translation house.



Hanna Leliv is a literary translator in Ukraine. Her translations from English have included books by Stephen Hawking, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ernest Hemingway.