Oleksandr Irvanets (Олександр Ірванець) was born in 1961, in Lviv, and grew up in Rivne. He studied at Dubno Pedagogical School, M. Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow), and taught for several years in school. In 1985, he founded the literary group Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque – Bawdy – Buffoonery) with Yuri Andrukhovych and Viktor Neborak, and organized poetic performances. Author of the novels Рівне / Ровно (Стина) (Rivne / Rovno: The Border, 2001), Хвороба Либенкрафта (Liebenkraft's Disease, 2010), Харкив 1938 (Kharkiv 1938, 2017). Irvanets has also written plays and translates literature from Belarusian, Polish, French, Russian, and Czech. He won Fulbright and Berlin Literary Colloquium scholarships, and was a finalist of the Central European Literary Award "Angelus" (Poland).