Anna Gruver

Anna Gruver was born in 1996 in Donetsk, where she lived until she was 17 years old.

She is the author of the debut novel Її порожні місця (Her Empty Places) about a teenage girl from Donetsk, violence and war. The book was published in the fall during Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in Old Lion Publishing House, Lviv, 2022. The Gruver’s novel has already entered the list of the best books of 2022 according to the version of the Ukrainian PEN Center.

Anna Gruver is also the author of the poetry book За вашим запитом нічого не знайдено (Nothing was found at your request), 2019. Her poems were translated into English, French, German, Polish, Czech, Estonian, Lithuanian, Romanian and Hebrew.

She took part in the readings Витіснене покоління (A Suppressed Generation) of the International Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv, in the Poetry DJ set program at the Translatorium Festival (2021), Ukrainian-Israeli readings Voices of Ukraine, Ukrainian Poetry in Translation Readings by PEN America and University of Pennsylvania, Ukrainian-Quebec poetry readings Lecture de poésie en direct de l’Ukraine et du Québec, discussions and poetry readings War in Ukraine: Gender & Poetry by Florida International University, Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab and Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, Worldwide Reading of Ukrainian Literature during Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin, Ukrainian Nights of Poetry at the opening of the International Měsíc autorského čtení festival in Brno (2022), in project Places in Change by Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Award and Hnat Khotkevych Palace (2023) and others.

Participant of the Residenz für Schriftsteller*innen in der Stiftung Genshagen (2022).

Gruver translates essays and contemporary poetry from Ukrainian into Polish and vice versa. Anna translated the book by Katie Ferris /boysgirls/ from English into Ukrainian (2021). In 2019, Anna received the third prize in the prestigious “Smoloskyp” literary competition for young writers. She was the co-editor of the bilingual poetry magazine Paradigma (2019-2021). Gruver also interviewed famous Ukrainian writers: Lyuba Yakymchuk, Iryna Shuvalova, Ostap Slyvynsky, Oksana Lutsyshyna, Vasyl Makhno, Ihor Kozlovsky.

At the beginning of the full-scale war, Anna Gruver was a volunteer in a shelter in Dnipro and in an orphanage evacuated from the Kyiv region to Lviv. In 2023, she worked as a Project Coordinator on a Ukrainian project and as an Assistant in the Education Department at the Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow, Poland).

Now Anna Gruver is working on a documentary cycle Я просто хочу поділитися моментом:// I just want to share a moment and a new novel Нерухомість (Real Estate), dedicated to the problems of migrants and Ukrainian youth’s life and anticipation of a full-scale invasion. A fragment of the new novel was announced in the third issue of Vogue Ukraine. Before the 2022 war, Anna lived in Kharkiv. She remains at present in Kyiv.