Writing

Nataliia Vorozhbyt

Born 4 April 1975 · Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR · 51

Nataliia Anatoliivna Vorozhbyt, born 4 April 1975, is a Ukrainian playwright, screenwriter and director. Vorozhbyt prefers to be referred to professionally as Natalka, the diminutive form of her name. Vorozhbyt graduated in 2000 from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. She has also studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop. She was a Visiting Fellow and Ukrainian Writer in Residence at St Hugh's College, Oxford for the 2023-24 term. She was named a member of PEN Ukraine in May 2024. Over the years she has written her scripts in both Russian and Ukrainian. This however increasingly caused her pain. Speaking to a reporter for The Moscow Times in 2014, she said, "In connection with the anti-Russian mood, many of my Ukrainian friends have purposefully switched to Ukrainian exclusively. The pain and hurt and protest that I feel make me want to do the same. I very much feel that moment has arrived. Then I think, damn it, Russian is my language, too. Why should I have to give it up? I love it. I write in it. Protest against myself? I won't do that." However, by the following year she was writing almost exclusively in Ukrainian. Together with German director Georg Genoux she founded the Theater of the Displaced, where refugees from Donbas could tell their stories,and curated the Class Act project. She wrote the screenplay for the feature film Cyborgs about the defense of Sergei Prokoviev Airport near Donetsk, where Ukrainian soldiers fought for 242 days against separatists. Vorozhbyt traveled through the war zone for four months and spoke with those involved. The war situation in Ukraine is a frequent theme in her work.