Ambassadors of Odesa Literature
The “Odesa — UNESCO City of Literature” Office is pleased to announce the launch of the Odesa Literature Ambassadors program abroad.
To honor our literary diplomats, we have created the Odysseus certificate. It is awarded to Odesa natives living abroad who have significant achievements in literature, have dedicated their work to culture, or are willing to contribute their connections, energy, creativity, and goodwill to a movement that promotes Odesa, its literary traditions, and contemporary writers on the global stage.
Our Odysseus is on a true journey in service of Odesa literature.
Ilya Kaminsky
American poet of Odesa origin, Nobel Prize in Literature nominee, professor, and author of the poetry collection Dances in Odesa and the play Deaf Republic (among other works).
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ilya Kaminsky has been supporting Odesa writers, museum workers, our wounded defenders, and fellow citizens from other regions of Ukraine affected by Russian aggression.
Thanks to Ilya Kaminsky’s guidance, we run the children’s poetry competition New Odyssey for ages 6 to 17. Participants have already joined international projects with our partners in various UNESCO Cities of Literature.
A program for translating world poetry into Ukrainian has also been launched, planned to run for one year — among many other initiatives. Our partner for all projects is the newspaper Vechirnya Odesa, where relevant information is published.
Beyond strictly literary projects, thanks to Ilya, we have created two initiatives for UNESCO International Jazz Day — Sing/Talk and jazz improvisations on poems by participants of the New Odyssey poetry competition, performed by the jazz trio Red Nova from Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. As a result, Odesa has remained on the UNESCO jazz map for two consecutive years (2023–2024) since the start of the full-scale invasion.
Meelis Kubits
Meelis Kubits — our Estonian friend, has dedicated himself to cultural public diplomacy. He became an Odesa resident by choice, having fallen in love with our city and its people from his very first visit. Since then, he has done a great deal to promote cultural exchange between Estonia, Ukraine, and other countries.
In 2011, for the first time in the history of our countries and cities, 100 Estonians visited Odesa as part of Meelis’s public diplomacy project Tallinn Goes to Odesa. Among the delegates were Estonian writers who met with Odesa audiences at the Literary Museum.
In 2012, Meelis organized the reciprocal visit project, during which 100 representatives of Odesa’s cultural community traveled to Tallinn. In 2013, 100 Odesa cultural figures participated among 600 participants in the project Everyone Goes to Yerevan.
In all these projects, Odesa literature and contemporary writers were prominently represented.
But the most remarkable project implemented by Meelis in Odesa was, of course, the flash mob Odesa Reads! Odesa Is Read!, which brought together lovers of Odesa literature from around the world. In 2017, works by Odesa authors were read in 30 languages, and over 1,000 participants joined the live reading chain on the city streets. Notably, a photo from this flash mob became the main image on Odesa’s UNESCO City of Literature page on the Creative Cities Network website in 2019.
As a UNESCO City of Music, Tallinn, thanks to Meelis Kubits’s efforts, supported the International Classical Music Festival Odessa Classic by Oleksiy Botvinov for all three years since the start of the full-scale invasion. The year 2024 was dedicated to the work of the world-renowned Ukrainian composer Valentyn Sylvestrov. In Tallinn, Valentyn Sylvestrov met with his distinguished colleague Arvo Pärt, singer and composer Sting, and also with the President of Estonia, Mr. Alar Karis.
Eugene Demenok
Eugene Demenok was born in 1969 in Odesa and has lived in Prague since 2015. He is a writer, journalist, and art historian. Together with Yevhen Mykhailovych Holubovsky, he co-founded the literary studio Green Lamp at the World Club of Odesans.
He is the author of books including The Catcher of Words (2012), New About the Burliuks (2013), The Case of Benya Krik: Stories about Odesa and Odesans (2015), All of Odesa Is Very Large (2016), Fresh Wind from the Sea: Notes of an Odesa Traveler (2019), David Burliuk. The Instinct of Aesthetic Self-Preservation (2020), Place of Power (2023), Leave or Stay (2024), The Man with Impeccable Taste (2024), among others. He is a laureate of the Odesa Municipal Paustovsky Prize for New About the Burliuks, the International David Burliuk Award, and the Ernest Hemingway Prize.
He serves on the Presidential Council of the World Club of Odesans. Yevhen has installed memorial plaques in Odesa honoring Yuriy Olesha, Kiriak Kostandi, Mikhail Vrubel, David Burliuk, and Oleksiy Kruchyonykh.
Thanks to Yevhen Demenok’s research, the world learned that the prominent artist and designer Sonia Delaunay — founder of the Orphism and Simultanism movements, a recipient of the Order of Arts and Letters, and an Officer of the French Legion of Honour — was born in Odesa