Askold Melnyczuk, Award-winning Novelist, Author and Editor

Askold Melnyczuk's latest novel, The House of Widows, was an Editor’s Choice selection of the American Library Association’s Booklist.  His second, Ambassador of the Dead, was a Los Angeles Times Best book for 2002 and is included on Citizen Works’ Progressive Reading List.  His first, What is Told, was a New York Times Notable Book. He’s published a novella about Rimbaud titled Blind Angel, and translated Girls, a novella by Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine’s leading novelist and poet, as well as a selection of poems, Eight Notes from a Blue Angel, by Marjana Savka.  An essay on visiting Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria was selected as a “Notable Essay” for 2008’s Best American Essays as were excerpts from his memoir-in-progress, Turbulence, Love in 2010. 

He received a three-year fellowship in fiction from the Lila Wallace Foundation, and numerous grants from the NEA for his work as editor of Agni, which he founded in 1972 and for which, in 2001, he received the Magid Award from PEN which described the magazine as “one of America’s, and the world’s, most significant literary journals.” He has edited six books, including three volumes in Graywolf's Take Three Poetry Series, as well as an anthology of writing from Ukraine, From Three Worlds, a volume on the painter Gerry Bergstein, and a book of essays about Father Daniel Berrigan.  Other work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Boston Globe, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Grand Street, Poetry, and so on. 

He’s taught at Harvard and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.  Founder of Arrowsmith Press, in 2011 he received the George Garret Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Associated Writing Programs.  Excerpts from SMEDLEY’s Secret Guide to World Literature, a novel in progress, may be heard on The Drum, as well as on WBUR. He is married to the writer Alexandra Johnson.