Carcanet signs English-language debut from Ukrainian poet Oksana Maksymchuk

Carcanet has signed Still City: A Diary of an Invasion, the English-language debut from Ukrainian poet Oksana Maksymchuk. 

Managing director Michael Schmidt acquired world rights, excluding the US and Canada, directly from the author. Carcanet will publish the poetry collection on 30th May, with the US edition, published by Pitt Poetry Series, due in autumn 2024. 

Still City is an "immersive chronicle of war" that Maksymchuk began as a journal in 2021 during the months leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The poems draw on social media posts, news reports, witness accounts, photographs and drone video footage to "shine a light on survival, mourning and hope through moments of terror and awe". The collection will be published with an introduction from Sasha Dugdale. 

Maksymchuk commented: "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."

Schmidt added: "I was astonished that Oksana, an established Ukrainian poet, wrote with such moving precision in English, bringing alive the time before the war, its incredible beginning and the awful attrition of its continuing. The poems speak with a deep humanity."