Taya Naydenko

Taya Naydenko was born in Odesa in 1982. Before becoming a journalist, she changed several universities and many professions, working in municipal administration, human resources, an Odesa morgue, and as an analyst in an IT company. As she says, all these different jobs had one thing in common: they were, in fact, work with texts. Since 2015, Naydenko has focused on journalism and essays. She began with Facebook writing, later became a columnist for several publications, and in 2018 joined the city newspaper Odesskaya Zhizn. She has written poetry since childhood and has taken part in poetry readings in Odesa since 2002. Her poems have appeared online and in print in Ukraine and abroad, including in the magazines SHO, Raduga, Artikl, Kashtan, and Gostinaya. In 2019, she published her first poetry collection, Everything Is Given, bringing together poems written between 2013 and 2018. Naydenko writes poetry and prose in Ukrainian and Russian. Her blog and literary work are valued for humour, nonconformism, directness, and attention to everyday details. One of the central figures in her wartime writing is her husband, a soldier in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. She regularly organises volunteer fundraising for his unit and writes about the realities of military family life in wartime Ukraine. She lives in Odesa.

Everything Is Given
2019

Ukrainian Women’s Novel
published in parts in Fifth Wave

Poems and prose
published in SHO, Raduga, Artikl, Kashtan, and Gostinaya

Wartime chronicles, essays, and blog texts