Embroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction from Ukraine and the Diaspora

Valya Dudycz Lupescu is a writer, poet, and editor living in Chicago. She is the author of the The Silence of Trees, a magical realism novel drawing upon Ukrainian folklore and history, as well as co-author of the nonfiction books Geek Parenting and Forking Good. The first volume of her new graphic novel trilogy, Mother Christmas, was published by Rosarium Publishing in 2022. Valya earned her M.F.A. in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her work has been published in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Kenyon Review, Gone Lawn, Jersey Devil Press, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, and others. She is the founding editor of Conclave: A Journal of Character and co-founder of the Wyrd Words Storytelling Workshop. Valya has been making magic with food and words for more than 30 years, incorporating traditions from her Ukrainian heritage with practices that honor the Earth.

Olha Brylova has lived in Dnipro, Ukraine, since her early childhood and cannot imagine living in a city without a big river. She has studied Japanese language and literature at Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, translated Japanese poetry into Ukrainian, and written several novels; recently, she has been writing screenplays for TV and video games. She dreams of becoming a showrunner of a big SF TV series and is sure that one day she will become one. Olha doesn’t fixate on any one particular genre — she has written fantasy, space opera, speculative fiction, and her next big thing is a detective story. She is also a huge cinephile and runs a blog about movies and TV series in partnership with her son Arseniі. She loves cats, including the one that is nibbling at her toes right now.

Iryna Pasko lives in Dnipro, Ukraine. She graduated from Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, a candidate of philological sciences majoring in Ukrainian literature. She taught at her alma mater from 2013 to 2022, and now works at the New Ukrainian School media and at the Dnipro Art Museum. Iryna has been shortlisted for the ProМинуле historical short story contest three times; and she has twice won the Starfort (Зоряна фортеця) fantastic short story contest. In 2021, Iryna was a finalist in the all-Ukrainian poetry competition Granoslov. In 2021-2022, she participated in the “Independence Agency” project, a collection of fantastic stories dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the restoration of Ukraine’s Independence; and Legendarium of the Wonder Cities (retellings of fairy tales). In 2022, Iryna wrote the online comic “Things” (“Речі”) about the experience of living the war in a relatively safe city, and she co-organized the fantasy-poetry competitions at the Аль Мор festival (2022) and the story competition #ракбоятисьне_можна (2022-2023). Before the full-scale war, Iryna collaborated with the Book Space Dnipro and Gogolfest (in Dnipro and Mariupol), as a lecturer and tour guide.