The Tompkins Agency for Ukrainian Literature in Translation
TAULT is a nonprofit literary agency and translation house devoted to the visibility and availability of contemporary Ukrainian Literature in the English-speaking world. Founded in 2018 by literary translator Zenia Tompkins, TAULT promotes the work of award-winning Ukrainian authors, with a specific interest in Ukraine’s younger generation of writers. Through our New Voices program, we also seek to build visibility for emerging authors of exceptional promise.
TAULT represents Ukrainian literature across a variety of genres and styles, from literary fiction and popular fiction to the growing field of Ukrainian creative nonfiction and the remarkable universe of Ukrainian children’s literature. In collaboration with our translators, we take a comprehensive approach to promoting our authors’ work, with the goal of building a broader audience for both the individual author and contemporary Ukrainian literature as a whole.
OUR TRANSLATORS
Zenia Tompkins
Director and Board MemberZenia, an American of Ukrainian descent, began translating Ukrainian literature in 2015, after fifteen years’ experience in education, academia, and the private sector. She holds graduate degrees in Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures from Columbia University and Islamic Studies from the University of Virginia. A past recipient of fellowships from the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others, Zenia has varying levels of proficiency in nine languages. Her translations have been supported by grants from the Ukrainian Book Institute, the House of Europe, and the Peterson Literary Fund, among others, and include Tanja Maljartschuk’s A Biography of a Chance Miracle, Olesya Yaremchuk's Our Others: Stories of Ukrainian Diversity, Vakhtang Kipiani's WWII, Uncontrived and Unredacted: Testimonies from Ukraine, and Oleksandr Shatokin's The Happiest Lion Cub (forthcoming). She lives in exurban Virginia with her husband and three kiddos. Zenia is currently translating books by Stanislav Aseyev, Oleksandr Mykhed, and Tanja Maljartschuk, scheduled for publication in late 2022 and early 2023. She has served as the lead English translator for The Old Lion Publishing House, Ukraine's premier literary press, since 2019.
Practice Areas: Adult, middle grade, and children's fiction and nonfiction (UA and RU)
Ali Kinsella
Associate Director for Translation and Board MemberAli has been translating from the Ukrainian for eight years. Her published works include Natalka Bilotserkivets' poetry collection Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, as well as essays, poetry, monographs, and subtitles to various films. She holds a Master’s degree in Slavic Studies from Columbia University, where she focused on Eastern European history and literature and wrote a thesis on the intersection of feminism and nationalism in small states. A former Peace Corps volunteer, she lived in both Western and Central Ukraine for nearly five years. Ali, whose translations have been supported by grants from the Ukrainian Book Institute and the Peterson Literary Fund, is currently translating novels by Vasyl Makhno and Myroslav Laiuk.
Practice Areas: Adult fiction, children's fiction and nonfiction, and and poetry (UA only)
Kate Tsurkan
Associate Director for Agenting and Board MemberKate is a writer, editor, and translator. Although French literature is her first love, she has called Western Ukraine her home for several years and, since moving to Ukraine, has developed a deep love for the Ukrainian language and literature. In 2017 she co-founded Apofenie , an online literary magazine that primarily publishes Central and Eastern European literature in translation. The magazine received press attention in Ukraine and the Czech Republic for issues dedicated to contemporary authors from both countries. Alongside her work with contemporary literature, Kate is completing a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century French literature at New York University.
Practice Areas: Adult and middle grade fiction and nonfiction (UA and RU)
Daisy Gibbons
Film Industry LiaisonBorn in Oxford but educated at Cambridge, Daisy graduated from the university’s Slavonic Department in 2018. Since beginning to translate at age twenty-two, she has translated, as well as edited translations of, various non-fiction books for Ukraine-based Osnovy Publishing. In 2020 she translated her first full-length novel, Tamara Horikha Zernya's BBC Book of the Year Award-winning novel Daughter. Her co-translation of Vakhtang Kipiani's WWII, Uncontrived and Unredacted: Testimonies from Ukraine was the recipient of a Ukrainian Book Institute translation grant and was published in 2021. She is currently translating novels by Artem Chapeye and Serhii Serhiiovych Saigon, and hopes to one day delve into (re-)translating Ukraine’s feminist classics.
Practice Areas: Adult fiction and nonfiction (UA and RU)
Tetiana Savchynska
Tetiana resides in Lviv and holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she studied on a Fulbright Scholarship. She was a 2019 resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre in Alberta, Canada. A prolific translator from English into Ukrainian, her recent published projects include Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Her writing and translations into English have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Asymptote. Tetiana is currently translating Oleksandr Mykhed's I'll Mix Your Blood With Coal: Understanding the Ukrainian East, which was awarded a translation grant from the House of Europe and is forthcoming in fall 2022.
Practice Areas: Adult and middle grade fiction and nonfiction (UA only)
Yuri Tkacz
A life-long resident of Melbourne, Australia, Yuri has been translating for over forty year and is undoubtedly one of the most prolific English translators of Ukrainian literature. He has translated novels by contemporary Ukrainian authors, as well as dozens of fiction and nonfiction books by Ukrainian authors from both the diaspora and Soviet Ukraine. A longtime publisher and owner of Bayda Books, a micropress dedicated to making Ukrainian literature available in Australia, Yuri is looking forward to having his translations, both present and past, published by American and British presses.
Practice Areas: Adult fiction (UA only)
OUR PARTNERS
Apofenie Magazine
Co-founded in late 2017 by Kate Tsurkan, a PhD student in French Literature at New York University, and literature aficionado Andrea Goldbergova of Brno, Apofenie is a magazine of modern Central and Eastern European literature, with a special interest in contemporary Ukrainian authors. To date, the journal has published issues highlighting the literary scenes in present-day Ukraine and the Czech Republic, as well as translations from other languages of the region.
Cadmus Press
Cadmus is a small press devoted to translations of literature from Eastern and Southeastern Europe that was co-founded in 2015 by Edward Lipsett and Dr. George T. Sipos as a sister-imprint of Kurodahan Press, a publisher of contemporary Japanese literature in translation. The first author published by Cadmus was Zoran Živković of Serbia, whose collected works the press is undertaking. The press published its first Ukrainian author, Tanja Maljartschuk, in 2018.
WHO WE WORK WITH
TAULT works with native-speaking translators at all stages of their careers. Our translators seek to support each other in their respective pursuits, with a shared mission of helping to promote Ukrainian literature in the English-speaking world. The authors whose work we represent are, likewise, at various stages of their careers, but we see both tremendous talent and promise in all of them.
TAULT is currently promoting books published by Old Lion Publishing (Lviv), Books XXI (Chernivtsi), Tempora (Kyiv), KSD/Family Leisure Club (Kharkiv), KM Books (Kyiv), Nora-Druk (Kyiv), Krok (Ternopil), and Krytyka (Kyiv).