Our life is a dream: a talk with author Yaroslav Melnyk

Yaroslav Melnyk (Jaroslavas Melnikas) is the son of Gulag deportees jailed for ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’, he was born in 1959 in Ukraine and lives in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a novelist, philosopher, and critic. He is the author of more than ten books, which have won acclaim in France, have been bestsellers in Lithuania and Ukraine, and have won many awards. The British Library called him, ‘the most cosmopolitan Ukrainian writer of the 21st century'. All of his books in Ukrainian prose were shortlisted for the “BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year” (2012, 2013, 2014) and his novel “Dalekyi prostir” (“The Remote Space”) became the “BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year” in 2013.

Svitlana Pyrkalo is a London-based writer, journalist, and translator. She graduated from the Kyiv National University, linguistics faculty. She was a journalist with the BBC Ukrainian and is the author of a number of books including The First Dictionary of Ukrainian Slang, a short novel Green Margarita, and Don’t Think About Red. In 2000 she became editor-in-chief of a TV talk show Without Taboo and from 2007 to 2009 Svitlana Pyrkalo wrote a weekly column in the Ukrainian-language magazine Glavred. She has also written for the Ukrainian newspaper, Gazeta po-ukrainsk.