Ukrainian literature is one of Europe’s oldest and least-translated traditions, and Glagoslav holds one of the largest English-language collections of it anywhere. These are the books that carry a nation’s voice into English: the founding classics, the poets who made a language, and the contemporary writers mapping a country at war and at the height of its powers.

At its root stands Taras Shevchenko, whose Kobzar shaped modern written Ukrainian and the national imagination itself. Around him gather the other founders: Ivan Franko, the philosopher-poet Hryhorii Skovoroda, and Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, the father of Ukrainian prose. From the twentieth century come the lyric visions of Bohdan Ihor Antonych; from our own, the restless, electric work of Serhiy Zhadan, Maria Matios, and Yuri Vynnychuk, alongside anthologies that gather many voices at once, from Herstories, a landmark of Ukrainian women’s prose, to The Frontier and its twenty-eight contemporary poets.

For the poets in particular, start with our reader’s guide to Ukrainian poetry in English. Fiction and poetry, drama and memoir, the classics and the newly urgent: browse the full list below, each title in careful English translation.