Yuri Andrukhovych

Yuri Andrukhovych was born in 1960 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. He studied journalism in Lviv and took advanced literature courses at the Maxim Gorky Institute in Moscow. After completing his military service in the Soviet Army, he founded the performance group Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Balagan-Buffoonery) in 1985, which had a lasting influence on the Ukrainian literary scene, particularly between 1988 and 1992. The artists expressed their criticism of real socialism through performative, satirical, vocal-poetic and carnivalesque poetic experiments. Following the publication of his first collections of poetry, Andrukhovych incorporated these multi-layered and grotesque-carnivalesque elements into his novels Rekreatsiji (1992, trans. Recreation), Moscoviada (1993; German edition 2006) and Perverzija (1996, German edition Perversion, 2011), which brought him to prominence. The driving force behind his writing was the situation in his homeland. With Poland’s accession to the EU, Ukraine had been pushed to the EU’s external border and was largely terra incognita in Western Europe and the USA. He reflected on Ukraine’s (non-)positioning in Europe at that time in Das letzte Territorium (2003), a collection of essays in the form of a ‘fictional regional study’. His first novel to be translated into German, Dvanadcjat’ obrutschiv (2003; German: Zwölf Ringe, 2005), depicts the chaos of the post-socialist transition period and the birth pangs of a new state as a colourful medley of Hutsul folklore, mafia-like businessmen, artists, eccentric characters from the advertising industry and shifting romantic relationships. His most recent book, Der Preis unserer Freiheit (2023), is a collection of essays written between 2014 and 2023. An indictment of the EU – for Andrukhovych warned early on and forcefully of Russia’s ambitions for great power status and urged that Ukraine not be lost sight of. He is co-editor of the ‘Ukrainian Library’, published in 2025, which aims to make the heritage of Ukrainian literature accessible to German-speaking readers.

Andrukhovych has been awarded numerous national and international prizes, including the Special Prize of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize in 2005 and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding in 2006. Eight years later (2014), he was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize alongside Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. In 2016, he was awarded the Goethe Medal. He also received the Heinrich Heine Prize from the City of Düsseldorf in 2022 and the Stefan Heym Prize in 2026.

Zwölf Ringe
Frankfurt am Main, 2005
(Translation: Sabine Stöhr)

Geheimnis
Frankfurt am Main, 2008
(Translation: Sabine Stöhr)

Karpatenkarneval
Berlin, 2019
(Translation: Sabine Stöhr)

Die Lieblinge der Justiz: Parahistorischer Roman
Berlin, 2020
(Translation: Sabine Stöhr)

Radio Nacht
Berlin, 2022
(Translation: Sabine Stöhr)

Der Preis unserer Freiheit
Berlin, 2023
(Translation: Sabine Stöhr)