Marianna Kiyanovska is a Ukrainian poet, essayist, translator and literary scholar. Her works have been translated into English, German, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Serbian, Czech, Slovak, Belarusian and Hebrew. In her poetry collection The Voices of Babyn Yar, which has won numerous literary awards, Kiyanovska tells the story of the Holocaust’s largest massacre: the murder over two days (29 and 30 September 1941) of more than 33,000 Jews — almost the entire Jewish population of Kyiv — by the SS and police special forces of the Third Reich. For Kiyanovska, observing the dead is a truly physical experience, with children and old people, mothers and teenagers screaming, whispering and moaning through her voice. ‘When I say “I am Rachel”, it’s not a buzz phrase for me, it literally is! I don’t feel like the author of these poems; they are “voices” that I simply wrote down.’ Kiyanovska’s real-life experiences made the book’s incredible authenti­city possible: she went to the frontline in Eastern Ukraine in 2016. For her, The Voices of Babyn Yar is about all wars in which people die en masse.