Serhiy Viktorovych Zhadan (born 23 August 1974) is a Ukrainian poet, novelist, essayist, and translator.
Zhadan was born in Starobilsk, Luhansk Oblast in Ukraine. He graduated from H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University in 1996 with a thesis on the work of Mykhail Semenko and the Ukrainian Futurist writers of the 1920s. He then spent three years as a graduate student of philology and taught Ukrainian and world literature from 2000 to 2004. Since then he has worked as a freelance writer.
Zhadan is an internationally known Ukrainian writer, with 12 books of poetry and 7 novels, and winner of more than a dozen literary awards. In March 2008, the Russian translation of his novel Anarchy in the UKR made the shortlist of the National Bestseller Prize. It was also a contender for „Book of the Year“ at the 2008 Moscow International Book Exhibition. In 2009 he won the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski Literary Prize. In 2012 Gunshot and Knife won Ukrainian rating „Book of the Year“ for fiction. His 2014 novel Voroshilovgrad won him the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in Switzerland, BBC Ukrainian’s “Book of the Decade” award and Brücke Berlin Prize. His selected poems Dynamo Kharkiv won Ukrainian “Book of the Year.” (2014) His book Mesopotamia won the Angelus literature prize in 2015, the Award of the President of Ukraine „Ukrainian Book of the Year“ in 2016.
Zhadan has translated poetry from German, English, Belarusian, and Russian, from such poets as Paul Celan and Charles Bukowski. His own works have been translated into German, English, Estonian, French, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Belarusian, Russian,[1] Hungarian, Armenian, and Czech.
