Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine’s leading contemporary author, was born in 1960. She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University in1982, and obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts in 1987. She has worked as a Research Associate for the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, lectured in the US on Ukrainian culture (at Penn State University, 1992, Harvard University, and University of Pittsburgh, 1994), and worked as a columnist for some of the Ukraine's major journals. After the publication of her novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996), later named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence”, she has been living as a free-lance author. She is Vice-President of the Ukrainian PEN. Ms.Zabuzhko lives in Kyiv.