Oksana Zabuzhko (b. 1960) is probably Ukraine’s major contemporary writer and one of the country’s leading public intellectuals. A daughter of blacklisted parents during the Soviet purges of the Seventies, it was not until the perestroika that her first book was published. After the publication of her novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996), which in 2006 was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence”, she has been living as a free-lance author.