Yuri Andrukhovych is a novelist, poet, essayist and translator. He studied Journalism and began as a lyric poet.
Andrukhovych has translated books and poems from Russian, Polish, English and German. In 1985 he became one of the founder members of the legendary literary performance group Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesk-Balagan-Buffonada, i.e. burlesque, merry-making, buffoonery). His three novels Rekreacij (1992), Moskoviada (1993), Perverzija (1999), translated into Polish and Russian, made him a modern classic of Ukrainian contemporary literature.
My Europe (with Andrzej Stasiuk), the fruit of a joint trip through little-known European east, was published in Poland in 2000. The German translation was published by Suhrkamp in May 2004.
At the outset of the 21st century, Andrukhovych is considered one of the most important voices of the Ukraine. He has received numerous national and international prizes including the Herder Prize awarded by the Alfred-Toepfer foundation (2001) and the special prize of the Erich-Maria-Remarque Peace Prize awarded by the town of Osnabrück (2005). This he took for what the judges called brilliant essays that importantly contribute to the discovery of almost unknown regions of the extended Europe.
In 2006 he received the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding.
