Sofiya Filonenko: Contemporary Ukrainian Bestseller: Celebrities, Trends and Readership

Bestselling books that shape public discourse are a recent phenomenon in independent Ukraine that has emerged alongside the development of the post-Soviet book market and more readers reading in Ukrainian. There are many reasons for the success of these books. The historical novel The Black Raven. The Remnant (2009) by Vasyl Shkliar and the non-fiction book The Case of Vasyl Stus (2019) by Vakhtang Kipiani, for example, are linked to political scandals. Adaptations of Western trends and genre traditions have also enjoyed commercial success, as in the case of Illarion Pavliuk’s thriller I See You’re Interested in Darkness (2020). These works become even more popular when adapted for the stage or screen. This presentation will explore the phenomenon of contemporary Ukrainian bestsellers and examine its cultural and social implications.

Sofiya Filonenko is a professor at the Department of Philology of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. She received her doctorate from the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine for her dissertation Масова література в Україні: дискурс/ґендер/жанр [Gender Discourse in Contemporary Ukrainian Mass Literature]. She specializes in contemporary popular fiction and bestsellers, women’s fiction, and detective fiction. In 2017, she published Місія здійсненна: популярна література у дзеркалі критики: літературно-критичні статті [Mission Accomplished: Popular Literature in the Mirror of Criticism: Literary-Critical Articles]. She is Head of the Jury of the International Literary Contest “Koronatsiya Slova” [Coronation of the Word] in the “Novels” category. From 2020 to 2021, she served as a jury member for the Lviv – UNESCO City of Literature Award.

The event forms part of a lecture series, organized by the Leibniz Research Network Central and Eastern Europe in collaboration with the Science at Risk project.