NATALKA VOROZHBYT

Natalka Vorozhbyt is a Ukrainian playwright and a leader in the resurgence of Ukrainian national drama in the 21st century. Her first major play, Galka Motalko, had success shortly after she graduated from Moscow’s Gorky Literature Institute in 2000. The Grain Store, a historical work about the Holodomor, the state-induced famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 2009. Vorozhbyt took part in the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv in 2013–2014, and the theme of the ensuing war with Russia has colored her work ever since. In 2015, she was a co-founder, with Georg Genoux, of the Theater of Displaced People, which offered an opportunity for refugees from the Donbas region to tell their stories in a formal, theatrical context. She wrote the screenplay for Cyborgs, a 2017 film about the bloody defense of an airport in Donetsk against Russian separatists. Bad Roads (2017) was staged at the Royal Court Theater in London, and, as a film directed by the author, was Ukraine’s official Oscar selection in 2022. Although she wrote in Russian early in her career, Vorozhbyt now writes in Ukrainian.