Lina Kostenko. Poetess from the 1960s, a classic of Ukrainian literature and a prominent leader

Lina Kostenko, a 1960s poetess, classic of Ukrainian literature, and public figure, celebrates her birthday on March 19. For supporting the dissident movement in the 1960s, her works were banned from publishing for 16 years. Despite this, she continued to write, albeit “into the desk.” Thus, the historical novel in verse “Marusia Churai,” a masterpiece of Ukrainian and world literature, for which Kostenko received the Shevchenko Prize in 1987, remained unknown for six years.

This fact is little-known, but the poetess was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1967, with Pavlo Tychyna and Ivan Drach on the list of 70 authors. Their names were discovered in documents made public by the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2017 — because the Nobel Committee’s material had been kept secret for 50 years, according to the BBC. Also, in 2022, the Verkhovna Rada committee declared its intention to nominate Lina Kostenko for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

When the full-scale invasion began in 2022, Kostenko gave her first interview in 12 years. In the conversation with the TV channel “Kyiv,” she stated that she did not stop working even when the battle was taking place near Kyiv in the spring of 2022.