Svetlana Lavochkina
Poet and translator (TUSI Guest Speaker)
Poetry Reading
Svetlana Lavochkina is a Ukrainian-born novelist, poet, literary translator and Waldorf teacher based in Germany since 1999. She writes in English. Her poetry and fiction have been published and translated internationally. Lavochkina was a prize-winner in the 2013 Paris Literary Prize and finalist in the 2015 Tibor & Jones Pageturner Prize. Her verse novel Carbon (Lost Horse Press, 2020) in self-translation was runner-up for the 2022 Krylaty Lev International Lviv Literary Prize.
Lavochkina has been translating 20th-century and contemporary Ukrainian poetry for fifteen years, contributing to several U.S. anthologies published by Academic Studies Press. She was the co-translator of Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk (Lost Horse Press, 2022), which received an honorable mention in the AAUS Translation Prize for 2020–2021. Her translation of Dmytro Kremin’s poetry collection A Violin from the Other Riverside (Lost Horse Press, 2023) was awarded the 2025 Panteleimon Kulish International Literary-Artistic Prize.
Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Lavochkina has been working to raise awareness for Ukraine in German-language mass media and collaborating on interdisciplinary projects, including Shigeru Ban’s Paper Sanctuaries: Pragmatism & Poetry for Ukrainian Refugees for the London Design Biennale 2023.