The Factory

Ihor Mysiak, born June 16, 1993 in Lviv, was a contemporary Ukrainian poet and prose writer. He studied history at Drohobych Pedagogical University and actively participated in the Revolution of Dignity. From late 2014 to mid-2015, he served as a military paramedic in the Azov Brigade.

Mysiak won several literary awards in Ukraine, including Khortytsia Bells (2018), Irpin Parnassus (2018), Zhytomyr TEM (2019), and An T-R-Act (2020). His work has been featured in Literary Chernihiv, Dzvin, and various anthologies.

In March 2022, a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, he joined the Territorial Defense Forces, fighting in the liberation of Kherson and later in the intense battles near Bakhmut.

His debut novel, The Factory, was published in Ukrainian soon after, a sign of hope during the early weeks of the full-scale invasion that Ukraine would stand. Ihor’s life was cut short at the front line when he was killed by Russia in the spring of 2023.

Hanna Leliv is a freelance literary translator working between Ukrainian and English. She was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation MFA program and mentee at the Emerging Translators Mentorship Program run by the UK National Center for Writing. Hanna has been collaborating with a range of Ukrainian and international publishers, and in 2023-24, she was a translator-in-residence at Princeton University.

Yevheniia Dubrova is a writer and literary translator from the Donetsk region of Ukraine. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. Winner of the 2024 Lando Grant for refugee writing from the de Groot Foundation, she writes about displacement, loss, memory, and what endures, and translates fiction, poetry, and plays from Ukrainian.