“The Crimean Tatars are a Sunni Muslim people who have had a pivotal
role in European history and culture for centuries, but we have been deaf
to their voices. They have defied the odds and withstood the murderous
oppression of Soviet and Russian dictators, but we have been blind to their
courage. By gathering together captivating works of contemporary
Crimean Tatar prose and poetry, Crimean Fig restores our senses. It calls
on us to listen and to open our eyes, at long last. What we discover in its
pages should change our understanding of Crimea, Ukraine, and Europe
forever.”
Crimean Fig /Qırım İnciri:
Contemporary Crimean Tatar Poetry and Fiction
Edited by Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed, Anastasia Levkova, and Askold Melnyczuk
Crimean Fig /Qırım İnciri: Contemporary Crimean Tatar Poetry and Fiction features stories and poems by contemporary Crimean Tatar writers. Shadowed by history, their work reflects the traumas endured by Crimean Tatars over the last three and a half centuries. They further chronicle the complex process of a people’s efforts at reintegration into an ancestral land from which they’d been exiled for over half a century. One hears, in both the stories and poems, a cultural and national pride, a love for a landscape of stunning natural beauty, and a longing for the stability of peace.
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Editors:
Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a memory studies scholar and literary critic. She teaches Ukrainian at Harvard University in the Departmentof Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her primary research interest is cultural memory, with a focus on Ukraine and Russia. She is the author of Russia’s Denial of Ukraine: Letters and Contested Memory (Lexington Books Press, 2024).
Anastasia Levkova is a writer, journalist, and cultural manager. From September 2016 to April 2017, she presented a literary program on Crimean-Tatar Hayat radio titled “Radio Bookstore with Anastasia Levkova.” She devised the principles for “Crimean Fig,” the contest of writers and translators founded in 2018, for which she is a co-founder, coordinator, and a jury member. She is the author of four books, including There is a Land Beyond Perekop: A Crimean Novel (Laboratory, 2023).
Askold Melnyczuk has published The Venus of Odesa, his selected poems, four novels and a book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow. A volume of selected non-fiction, With Madonna in Kyiv: Why Literature Still Matters (More than Ever), will be published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2026. He has edited a book of essays on the St. Lucian Nobel-prize-winning poet Derek Walcott and is also co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian writers from the 1980s generation. Founding editor of Agni and Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
