Iya Kiva

Iya Yanivna Kiva was born on May 4, 1984, in the city of Donetsk. She graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Donetsk National University, majoring in Russian Language, Literature, and Culturology. She also studied graphic design. Due to the Russo-Ukrainian war, in the summer of 2014, she moved to Kyiv.

Kiva began writing in Ukrainian at the beginning of the war. These included poems, translations and reviews, published in domestic and foreign periodicals, as well as in anthologies such as, Антологія молодої української поезії III тисячоліття (Anthology of young Ukrainian poetry of the third millennium). She is the author of the poetry collections Подальше от рая (Further from Heaven; 2018) and Перша сторінка зими (The First Page of Winter; 2019). Her poems have been translated into several languages, including English,[2][3] and her essays have been translated into German.

She is the winner of a number of international and Ukrainian festivals and competitions, including the International Poetry Festival "Emigrant Lyre" (2016) and the International Poetry Competition "Gaivoronnya" (2019). Kiva is a laureate of the award named after Yuri Kaplan (2013), the literary competition of the Smoloskyp publishing house (2018, 4th prize), the Metaphora translation prize (2018), and others. She is the winner of the II Poetry Tournament and the Nestor the Chronicler Prize (2019),[4] as well as Metaphora Translation Prize (2020).[5]

The book Подальше от рая (Further from Heaven) was included in the list of the best books of 2018 according to PEN Ukraine.[6] The poetry collection, Перша сторінка зими (The First Page of Winter), received a special award from the jury of the "ЛітАкцент-2019" (LitAccent-2019) award,[7] and was included in the list of the best books of 2019 according to PEN Ukraine.[8] The book, Ми прокинемось іншими (We will wake up to others), was included in the list of important non-fiction books according to The Village Ukraine,[9] and the list of the best books of 2021 according to the Ukrainian PEN.[10]

She has participated in poetry events, as well as national and international festivals in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Belgium and Finland. She is a scholar of the program of the Minister of Culture of Poland Gaude Polonia (2021), and participant in the literary residence "Гніздо" (The Nest Residency) in the village of Vytachiv, Kyiv Oblast (2022). As a translator, Kiva participated in international translation seminars "Cities of translators digital", a draft program of the German Translation Foundation "TOLEDO" with the support of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (online, 2020) and "Tłumacze bez granic" (Translators without Borders; 2021, Wojnowice, Poland).