Michael M. Naydan

Michael M. Naydan is the Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He has received numerous prizes for his translations, including the George S. N. Luckyj Award in Ukrainian Literature Translation from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies in 2013. He has been writing about Ukrainian literature—and translating it—for WLT since 2005. His essay “Hope Is the Meaning of the Maidan for Ukraine and the World” appeared in 2014. Naydan and Alla Perminova have just completed a translation of a biography by Serhii Rudenko under the title Zelensky: A Biography, which will be published by Polity Books in July 2022.

Literary and Historical Sources for Understanding Ukraine: A Recommended Reading List

July 2022
Michael M. Naydan

In the past, regrettably, there has been a dearth of translations of Ukrainian literature available in English. This situation has dramatically changed over the last decade with numerous authors and...
Ukraine Needs the World’s Love, Help, and Prayers Now

February 24, 2022 | Michael M. Naydan

Photo by Steve Evans / Flickr A longtime scholar, translator, and promoter of Ukrainian literature reflects on the existential crisis confronting Ukraine—and the West—today. In Pavlo...
Hope Is the Meaning of the Maidan for Ukraine and the World

January 27, 2014 | Michael M. Naydan

Barricade with the protesters at Hrushevskogo street on January 26, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. Photo Sasha Maksymenko/Flickr The movement is precisely about what Nadya, the elderly...
"Emerging Ukrainian Women Prose Writers: Twenty Years After Independence"

November 2011
Michael M. Naydan

In the Ukrainian literary tradition there have been scores of women poets, several of them reaching extraordinarily prominent status. The most renowned of them include the legendary seventeenth-centur...