Askold Melnyczuk has published four novels, a book of stories, and a novella about the life of Rimbaud. What Is Told (Faber, 1994), a New York Times Notable, was the first commercially published novel to highlight the Ukrainian refugee experience. Other novels include an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. A volume of selected non-fiction, With Madonna in Kyiv: Why Literature Still Matters (More than Ever) will be published in 2026 by Harvard. He edited a book of essays on the St. Lucian Nobel-prize winning poet Derek Walcott and is co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian writers from the 1980s generation. He’s the recipient of a Lila Wallace Award in Fiction, the George Garret Award from AWP, and awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, The Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. Founding editor of Agni, for which he received the PEN-Magid Award for Editing, and Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts–Boston.

The Venus of Odesa
is available through MadHat Press: