Oleh Lysheha
| Oleh Lysheha Олег Лишега |
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|---|---|
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| Born |
October 30, 1949 Tysmenytsia, Ukrainian SSR |
| Died | 17 December 2014 (aged 65) Kyiv, Ukraine |
| Occupation | Poet, translator |
| Nationality | Ukrainian |
Oleh Lysheha (Ukrainian: Олег Лишега; 30 October 1949 – 17 December 2014) was a Ukrainian poet, playwright, translator and intellectual. Lysheha entered Lviv University in 1968, where during his last year, he was expelled for his participation in an "unofficial" literary circle, Lviv Bohema. As punishment, Lysheha was drafted into the Soviet army and internally exiled. During the period 1972-1988, he was banned from official publication, but in 1989 his first book Great Bridge (Velykyi Mist) was published. For "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha," Lysheha and his co-translator James Brasfield from Penn State University, received the 2000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Lysheha is the first Ukrainian poet to receive the PEN award.
Oleh Lysheha was born in 1949 to a family of teachers in Tysmenytsia, a Carpathian village in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine. Twenty years later, Lysheha became a student studying foreign languages at the university in Lviv named after the renowned Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko. In 1972, Lysheha was expelled and drafted to the Soviet army for membership in Lviv Bohema, a dissident group of artists at Lviv University. After serving in the military, the poet returned to his birthplace, working at a local factory.
In due time, Lysheha returned to Lviv, and soon thereafter moved to Kiev (Kyiv) where he married. In his position as a technical employee at the Kyiv Theatrical Institute of Karpenko Karyi, Lysheha continued to write poems and translate. From 1997–98, Oleh Lysheha was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar to Penn State in Pennsylvania, United States. After his return to Ukraine, the poet dove into a prolific artistic labor of poetry, painting and sculpture, as well as resumed his seasonal alteration between the capital and his birth home in the Carpathian mountains.
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