Olesya Yaremchuk, a freelance journalist and writer based in Lviv, has been named the Spring 2024 Harriman Resident at the Austrian Society for Literature, in partnership with the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. The residency is jointly supported by the Harriman Institute, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and the Austrian Society for Literature (der ÖGfL). The six-month residency offers time and space to one writer working on a long-term project.

Yaremchuk is the author of Our Others: Stories of Ukrainian Diversity, an award-winning exploration of both the histories and personal stories of fourteen ethnic minority groups living within the boundaries of present-day Ukraine: Czechs and Slovaks, Meskhetian Turks, Swedes, Romanians, Hungarians, Roma, Jews, ‘Liptaks’, Gagauzes, Germans, Vlachs, Poles, Crimean Tatars, and Armenians. Based on a combination of academic research, fieldwork, and interviews, Yaremchuk’s literary reportage paints realistic, thoughtful, and historically informed depictions of how these various groups arrived in Ukraine and how they have fared within the country’s borders.

During the residency, Yaremchuk will continue her Our Others project. She is currently working on texts about the Crimean Tatars, the Jews of Kharkiv, and the Roma of the Kherson region. During the coming months ahead she will record four new stories: the Karaites of Crimea, the Remeians and Urums of Mariupol, and the Georgians of the Donetsk region.

Yaremchuk’s many awards include the Samovydets Literary Reportage Award from Tempora Publishing House (2014), “LitAccent of the Year Award” (2018), both in Ukraine, and she was shortlisted for the ADAMI Media Prize and the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Award.