Askold Melnyczuk
| Askold Melnyczuk | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 12, 1954 Irvington, New Jersey |
| Occupation | novelist, essayist, memoirist, poet, |
| Nationality | United States |
| Period | 1974 - present |
| Genre | fiction, memoir, essay, poetry, |
| Literary movement | popular, literary, |
Askold Melnyczuk (born December 12, 1954) is an American writer whose publications include novels, essays, poems, memoir, and translations. Among his works are the novels What Is Told, Ambassador of the Dead, House of Widows and Excerpt from Smedley's Secret Guide to World Literature. His work has been translated into German, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Melnyczuk also founded the journal AGNI (magazine) and Arrowsmith Press (2006).
Melnyczuk was born in Irvington, New Jersey. He was raised in Roselle Park and Cranford, New Jersey, twenty miles south of New York City. His younger sister, Hanna, is a painter and teacher. His parents, Edward Melnyczuk and Olena Zahajkewycz Melnyczuk, were Ukrainian refugees who fled Peremyshl, Poland in 1944, along with his grandfather, the noted scholar and educator, Bohdan Zahajkewycz. After five years in a refugee camp in Berchtesgaden, Germany, they were finally granted permission to immigrate to the United States. In 1975, the family, who sheltered a number Jewish friends during the war, were designated "righteous among gentiles" and invited to plant a tree at Yad Vashem in Israel.
Melnyczuk graduated from Cranford High School, where a twelfth grade English teacher underscored the single most important lesson for any writer: the art revision. In high school, he won both a national essay contest and a state poetry prize. With friends, he also founded AGNI (magazine), which began as an "underground" newspaper and sold for a penny. While attending Antioch College, from 1972 through 1973, he transformed AGNI into a literary journal. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Rutgers University in 1976. That same year, he moved to Boston to attend Boston University's celebrated Creative Writing Program. Studying with poet George Starbuck and novelist Rosellen Brown, he graduated with a Master of Arts in 1977.
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