Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2025
Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection 2025
Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes 2024

Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk's debut in English, reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Inevitably, there are dramatic shifts in perspective: this diary of an invasion recreates the mood and tone of the context within which a poet's imagination must make sense of the change.

Drawing on various sources, including social media, the news, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience. The book began 'as a poetic journal I started keeping in my hometown of Lviv, Ukraine in 2021–22. In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of a catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity. While we, as a family and a community, made preparations for air strikes, as well as nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, our relationships transformed, as did our sense of time, fate, and personhood.'

Prizes

Long-listed for Griffin Poetry Prize 2025,Long-listed for PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection 2025

'I am grateful for Maksymchuk's radical honesty, for her willingness to take me to her homeland, to its lit display cabinets filled with cakes, its candied pinecones, the lushness of its flowers, its classrooms filled with children, so that I can begin to understand the brutality of its violation.' - Diane Seuss;'Oksana Maksymchuk is someone whose work I have known and admired for years, and yet nothing prepared me for her new book. There is terrifying restraint in these poems of war wherein realism becomes a song, realism becomes hallucination, realism is a naked nerve set to a tune. Terrifying, yes, but necessary. Still City is an important book.' - Ilya Kaminsky

Oksana Maksymchuk was born in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1982. She is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia and Lovy, in the Ukrainian, as well as a co-editor of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry. Her English-language poems have appeared in The Irish Times, The London Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry London, PN Review, The Poetry Review and elsewhere. Oksana was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and a winner of the Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association of America, the Peterson Translated Book Award, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, the Richmond Lattimore Prize, and the Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize. She holds a PhD in ancient philosophy from Northwestern University. In recent years, Oksana has been dividing her time between her home in Lviv, the United States, and Europe.