Askold Melnyczuk receives PEN award for magazine editing (05/27/01)

Askold Melnyczuk receives PEN award for magazine editing

by Ika Koznarska Casanova

NEW YORK - Askold Melnyczuk, editor of the literary journal AGNI - one of the leading university journals promoting the best of contemporary literature - received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing as part of the 2001 PEN American Center Literary Awards. The presentations were held on Monday, May 21, at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

Since its inception in 1972, AGNI has gone through many incarnations, including tenures at Antioch College where it was founded by Mr. Melnyczuk while still an undergraduate student, as a private publication in Western Massachusetts, and, since 1987, at Boston University, where it has been supported by the graduate Creative Writing Program.

As stated in AGNI's mission statement, the journal derives its vision from the premise that literature and the arts "are part of a broad, ongoing cultural conversation that every society needs to remain vibrant and alive. ... Writers and artists hold a mirror up to nature, mankind, the world; they courageously reflect their age, for better or worse; and their best works provoke perceptions and thoughts that help us understand and respond to our age."

In publishing both emerging and established writers as well as works in translation, AGNI has been recognized for its high literary standards, and has attained a profile that is global in scope.

AGNI has published many of the world's leading poets and fiction writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Derek Walcott, Robert Pinsky, Chinua Achebe and Seamus Heaney, as well as early work by such diverse authors now nationally recognized as Jumpha Lahiri, Ha Jin and Tom Sleigh. As an example of the journal's continuing commitment to emerging writers, its 25th anniversary issue was devoted exclusively to previously unpublished writers.

Each issue of the semiannual publication includes the works of at least 40 writers and artists, and most issues include works translated from eight or more languages. Translations in AGNI have appeared from Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Slovene, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu and Yiddish.

Among the Ukrainian writers who have been published in AGNI over the years were émigré writers like Vasyl Barka; members of the New York Group Bohdan Boychuk, Bodhan Rubchak and Yuri Tarnawsky; dissident writers Mykola Rudenko and Vasyl Stus; established Ukrainian writers such as Ivan Drach; as well as representatives of a younger generation of writers such as Yuri Andrukhovych, Oleh Lysheha, Yuri Vynnychuk, Oksana Zabuzhko and editor and literary scholar Solomea Pavlychko.

On the initiative of Mr. Melnyczuk, the Vasyl Stus Award is presented annually by PEN New England, with this year's award going to Iranian writer and human rights lawyer Mehrangiz Kar.

AGNI also gives the annual Solomea Pavlychko Award in literary criticism, sponsored by a grant from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The award's first recipient was Susan Sontag, while this year the award was accorded to John Leonard.

Ukrainian contributing editors to AGNI have included Ms. Pavlychko, as well as Dzvinia Orlowsky and Ms. Zabuzhko.

The list of translators of Ukrainian works for the journal includes Halyna Hryn, Michael Naydan, Virlana Takcz, James Brasfield and Mark Rudman, as well as Mr. Melnyczuk, who translated the poetry of Bohdan Boychuk.

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Mr. Melnyczuk's latest novel, "Ambassador of the Dead," was released as a publication of Counterpoint Press on May 1.

His fist novel, "What is Told," received extensive critical acclaim and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book in 1994.

Mr. Melnyczhuk's poetry, fiction, translations and reviews have appeared in many national magazines, including The Nation, Partisan Review, Grand Street, Poetry and The Southwest Review. His work has been anthologized in "The McGraw Hill Book of Poetry, Under Thirty-Five: The New Generation of American Poets" (1989) and "The Four-Way Reader."

He is the recipient of the numerous awards for fiction, among them the Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the McGinnis Prize and PEN.

Mr. Melnyczuk teaches in the Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars and at Boston University. This fall he will take a new academic post teaching fiction at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

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