Lyubov Sirota

Lyubov Makarivna Sirota (Любов Макарівна Сирота; born June 21, 1956) is a Ukrainian poet, writer, playwright, journalist and translator.

In 1975 Sirota moved with her parents to their ancestral homeland, Ukraine.

There, she received a degree in Russian language and literature from the philology department at Dnipropetrovsk National University.

In 1983 she moved with her son Alexander to the new city of Pripyat (near the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, 1.5 km away), where she headed the literary group "Prometheus" and a literary studio for children.

She also managed department of the Palace of Culture Energetik (literally, the "energy plant worker").

At the Palace of Culture, Sirota wrote and directed two plays: the musical "We Couldn't Not Find Each Other" and "My Specialty — a life", a biography of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

As a former inhabitant of the city of Pripyat and an eyewitness (and victim) of the Chernobyl disaster, she has devoted a great part of her creative output to the 1986 catastrophe.

She writes in both Ukrainian and Russian, and also translates from Ukrainian into Russian and vice versa.

Her poems have been translated into many languages, including English.

Sirota was born in Irtyshsk, Pavlodar Province, Kazakhstan (then a part of the USSR) to a large family which had been deported from Ukraine.

When she was one, her family moved to the Kyrgyzstan capital, Frunze (now Bishkek).

Her mother wanted to move to the city so that her children could have more opportunities for education and development.

Sirota spent her childhood in Frunze, where she was a member of the city literary studio ("The Dawn of Mountains").

There she developed a dissident spirit: fostering freedom and love of truth.

Her first literary works were printed in Kyrgyzstan magazines.

The latter play was more successful, and was scheduled to be repeated when the Chernobyl nuclear station exploded on April 26, 1986.

Sirota and her son were among the tens of thousands evacuated from the area following the event.

Their lives were forever changed due to the evacuation, the loss of friends and acquaintances, and the assault on their health due to radiation exposure.

Despite her suffering, however, the experience enhanced Sirota's poetic talent.

To express her grief and rage she wrote poetry and collected them in a book, "Burden".

Burden was published in 1990 in Kyiv (capital of Ukraine), where Sirota (as of 2011) lives with her family.

In Kyiv, Sirota worked as a film editor in the Dovzhenko Film Studios.

After her evacuation from Pripyat she reorganized "Prometheus", using poetry and music to proclaim the truth about the Chernobyl area and its people.

However, repeated hospitalization for fatigue and pain (typical results of radiation exposure) increasingly interfered with her work.

Since 1992 Sirota has been an invalid; however, at home she continues her efforts to prevent another Chernobyl.

Her poems have been translated from Russian into other languages, and are known in many countries from the translation of Burden into English by Elisavietta Ritchie, Leonid Levin and Birgitta Ingemanson, with the assistance of Professor Paul Brians in the United States.

Sirota's poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies in the United States, Canada and the UK.

The hard life experience after Chernobyl has led Lyubov Sirota to the understanding what terrible danger the atomic engineering and all dangerous technologies carry, the pain-alarm was already not only for destiny of own family, own city, own country (Ukraine), but also for destiny of all world, for all, who live on the Earth.

This universal pain dictated more from the lines of her poems after Chernobyl.

She is convinced, that to describe all this there will be not enough of one life, therefore the theme of Chernobyl, as well as a theme of a survival and spiritual regeneration of mankind – continue to remain the main themes of her poetry, journalism and prose now... Especially fully and sharply these themes are expressed in her essay about the destinies of Chernobyl women "Excessive burden" and in her prose book – film-story "Pripyat syndrome", which has been recently issued at support of the site Pripyat.com and the International public organization "Center PRIPYAT.com", as a Russian/English edition of the poems illustrated with photos of Prypiat – "To an Angel of Pripyat"], published 2010.

Also this life experience after Chernobyl has led to the understanding of necessity to search for a way for survival of mankind and rescue of our planet.

So "The Appeal to the citizens of the Earth from the victims of Chernobyl" has arisen, from which the International Annual Action "The Saved Planet" has begun.

One of Lyubov Sirota's articles "The modelling of the future — is a reality"] is devoted to this theme.

In 2022, after a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and a month-and-a-half stay under occupation, Lyubov Sirota was forced to leave her homeland and now she temporarily live abroad.

In August 2022, she participated in the 75th anniversary of Edinburgh International Festival in "the Poetry Reading: Art and Activism in the Nuclear Age" at the Scottish Poetry Library.

Where 10 Scottish and international poets said about the catastrophic, widespread and persistent humanitarian and environmental consequences posed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine — another terrible reminder of the nuclear knife-edge on which the world is precariously balanced.

And 7 January 2023 poetry Lyubov Sirota was presented on the convention of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) was taken place in San Francisco.

It was on the Session Information on the Subject: Comparative Literature — Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries in the Program: Just-in-Time was.

In which were the presentations: Violence and Poetry Now: Sirota, Rushdie, and Saito.

Where her poetry was presented by past president of the Joseph Conrad Society of America, Ph.D. Debra Romanick Baldwin from the University of Dallas: