Solomiia Pavlychko

Biography

Solomiia Pavlychko was born December 15, 1958 in Lviv. Her father was the well-known Ukrainian poet, Dmytro Pavlychko. She graduated in English and French from the Romance-Germanic Faculty of Kiev University, earning a PhD in English literature in 1984. From 1985 she worked at the National Academy of Science of Ukraine. She was a Doctor of Philosophy, a professor at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and a member of the Writer's Union of Ukraine. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, and at Harvard University, where she was a Fulbright fellow. Since 1992 she was the head of the editorial board of the publishing house Osnovy in Kiev.

Pavlychko wrote book-length studies of American romanticism, Byron, the modern English novel and modernism in Ukrainian literature. Her memoir of the first years of Ukrainian independence in 1990-1, Letters from Kiev, was published in English in 1992. She was also a prolific translator: among her Ukrainian translations are William Golding's Lord of the Flies and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Mrs. Pavlychko also contributed to the work of the World Bank/UNESCO Task Force on Higher Education in Developing Countries, whose report was issued in Feb. 2000. She left unfinished a biography of the Ukrainian poet and orientalist Ahatanhel Krymsky. She died on December 31, 1999.

Works