Nataliia Vorozhbyt

Nataliia Anatoliivna Vorozhbyt, commonly known as Natalka, was born on April 4, 1975, and has established herself as a prominent Ukrainian playwright, screenwriter, and director. She graduated from the esteemed Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow in 2000 and further honed her craft at the Iowa Writers Workshop. In the 2023-24 academic year, she was honored as a Visiting Fellow and Ukrainian Writer in Residence at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and became a member of PEN Ukraine in May 2024.

Throughout her career, Vorozhbyt has crafted works in both Russian and Ukrainian, grappling with the emotional complexities of language in a politically charged environment. In a 2014 interview with The Moscow Times, she expressed the internal conflict of her linguistic identity, ultimately transitioning to writing almost exclusively in Ukrainian by 2015.

She co-founded the Theater of the Displaced with German director Georg Genoux, which provides a platform for refugees from the Donbas region to share their stories. Her notable works include the screenplay for the film "Cyborgs," which chronicles the harrowing defense of Sergei Prokoviev Airport near Donetsk, where Ukrainian forces endured a grueling 242-day standoff against separatists. Vorozhbyt's experiences in the war zone, where she spent four months interviewing participants, deeply inform her artistic vision, making the ongoing conflict in Ukraine a central theme in her storytelling.