Tamara Horikha Zernia. Daughter

Tamara Horikha Zernia

Work proposed for translation: 

Daughter
A novel (2019)
Length: 285 pp.
Copyright: Agency: rights.ovo.eu@gmail.com

Tamara Horikha Zernia (real name Tamara Duda, born 1976) is a Ukrainian writer and translator. She studied at the Institute of Journalism at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and Kyiv International University. She translates economic texts from English. She is married and has three children. In 2014, she joined the volunteer movement and raised funds to purchase equipment for military personnel. In 2019, her debut novel, Daughter, was published and named BBC Book of the Year. Later, in 2022, this work was awarded the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine. In 2021, the writer’s second novel, The Principle of Intervention, was published.

The novel Daughter, the author’s debut work, depicts the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas (2014). It primarily focuses on the changes that occur in the space, the living conditions of people, and, in general, the people themselves. The work is based on documentary evidence from eyewitnesses collected by the author, as well as her own experience (prototypes of real people, real stories of the beginning of the occupation, the war itself). At the centre of the plot is the life of a young woman with the nickname Elf, who organised her own volunteer unit in Donetsk at the beginning of the war. The reader has the opportunity to see the transformation of the main character in unusual realities — the realities of the war. The novel Daughter is quite realistic, but there is also mysticism present; there is no past here, but there is hope for the future.