Olena Styazhkina

Her book "Cecil the Lion Had to Die" won the Lviv–UNESCO City of Literature Award in 2023.

Olena Styazhkina studied at Vasyl' Stus Donetsk National University. The recorded working language is Ukrainian and Russian. The field of work recorded is literature, history and opinion journalism. Employment is recorded with Institute of the History of Ukraine and Vasyl' Stus Donetsk National University. Distinctions recorded are Russia Award.

Stiazhkina was born in 1958 in Donetsk and has a Ph.D. in history.

From 1993 to 2014, she taught Slavic History at Donetsk National University. After the Russian occupation of Donetsk in 2014, Stiazhkina left the city and taught at Mariupol State University from 2015 to 2016. A native Russian speaker, from 2014, Stiazhkina also began writing solely in Ukrainian. Since 2016, Stiazhkina has worked as a research fellow in history at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She was also a virtual writer in residence at the faculty of medieval and modern languages at the University of Oxford's New College in 2023. Stiazhkina has also published collections of novels and short stories in Ukrainian and Russian. Her second novel was the book "Cecil the Lion Had to Die", which was released in 2021. In 2023, she was a member of the jury for the Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize. In 2024, she released the war diary "Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary".

• Olena Stiazhkina (author), Anne O. Fisher (translator). "Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary". 2024. ISBN 978-0674291706. • Olena Stiazhkina (author), Dominique Hoffmann (translator). Cecil the Lion Had to Die (2024) Harvard University Press. (English). • Olena Stiazhkina. Cecil the Lion Had to Die (2021) (Ukrainian) • Olena Stiazhkina. Zero Point Ukraine: Four Essays on World War II (2021) Ibidem Press. ISBN 978-3838215501. • Olena Stiazhkina. Rozka. (2018) • Olena Stiazhkina. In God's Language. (2016)