Vasyl Makhno to visit Ukraine with new novel

Vasyl Makhno, the first winner of Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize for his novel Eternal Calendar, will present his new book, The Angel and the Donkey. With Poems about Fire and Water, in the western Ukrainian cities of Buchach and Ternopil, respectively, on 24–25 May 2026. The novel is an outgrowth of the author’s participation in the Agnon Literary Residency, held in Buchach, the birthplace of Shmuel Yosef Agnon, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966. The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter supported three short-term residencies in Buchach between 2018 and 2021, which resulted in the publication of three books of essays by nine Ukrainian writers. The essays and information about the residency are available here.

Makhno’s commentary on this new novel and biography are available below.

Vasyl Makhno on his new novel The Angel and the Donkey
I conceived this novel in Buchach, while I was in a writer's residency there. It was 2019. Then my Eternal Calendar had just been released. And it so happened that I had enough time to think about writing my next prose works. Of course, the path from idea to realization is not easy and long. I wrote The Angel and the Donkey for five years, partly visiting all the locations where the events unfold. I traveled, observed, and invented. And although the places in this novel are definitive, they are still, in my opinion, not the main ones. It intertwines many questions that we ask ourselves throughout life: what is homeland, family, word? What does it mean to leave home and return? Why do everyday life and a sacred text interpenetrate and complement each other? What happens to us in the direction from youth to adulthood? And why do the elements of fire and water accompany the main characters — writers Victor Preisner and Shmuel Yosef Agnon?

The novel, in my opinion, is multifaceted; its architecture is embodied in the interweaving of important concepts — time, eras, names, toponyms, central issues of Christianity and Judaism. This is a novel in which many musical themes echo, like in a symphony. Is this easy reading? Probably not. Because nothing in this world is easy, not even writing.

Vasyl Makhno (1964) is a poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. In 2024, Ukraine’s Old Lion Publishing House published his selected works in two volumes ("Scheme", Vol. 1 — Poems; "Chickens Don’t Fly", Vol. 2 — Essays). A book of short stories, House in Baiting Hollow, was published in 2015, followed by the novels Eternal Calendar (2019) and The Angel and the Donkey. With Poems about Fire and Water (2026). He is the author of five books of essays: Gertrude Stein Park of Culture and Recreation (2006), The Bag Was Rolling (2011), The Neighborhood and the Borderlands (2019), Along the Ocean on a Bike (2020), From Vowels and Consonants: An encyclopedic dictionary of names, cities, birds, plants and all sorts of things (2023) and translations of Polish poetry, in particular Zbigniew Herbert’s String of Light (1996), Janusz Schuber’s Caught in the Net (2007), Anna Freilich’s Father’s Name (2022), Bohdan Zadura’s Simple Truths (2024, together with Anna Gruver). Makhno’s works have been translated and published in many languages in different countries. Separate editions have been published in Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Romania, Serbia, and the USA. He participated in numerous international festivals, meetings, and symposia in Serbia, Poland, Slovenia, Romania, Germany, India, Colombia, Nicaragua, North Macedonia, Israel, Mongolia, Lithuania, Canada, the USA, and others. He is the winner of several literary awards, including the International Serbian Poetry Prize Povelje Morave (2013) and Ukraine’s BBC Book of the Year (2015). He is the first laureate of Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize (2020). He has lived in the United States since 2000.