Ivan and Phoebe
by Oksana Lutsyshyna
"Ivan and Phoebe" won Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko National Prise for Literature in 2021. The novel chronicles the lives of several young people involved in the Revolution on the Granite in 1990. The story is set in Uzhgorod, Kyiv and Lviv. As the characters come to exercise their rights to free speech and protest, something that their upbringing absolutely had not prepared them to do, they must also re-evaluate the norms of marriage, family, and home life. While the former initially appear to be areas of peace and harmony, they are soon revealed to be hot beds of conflict and multigenerational trauma.