Prof. Nataliya Torkut

Professor Nataliya Torkut founded the Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre in 2009 and established Ukraine’s nationwide Shakespeare festival, ‘Shakespeare Days in Ukraine,’ in 2018. She holds a professorship in the Department of German Philology, Translation and World Literature at Zaporizhzhia National University, having previously headed the Department of English and Foreign Philology at Zaporizhzhia’s Classic Private University.  She trained at Dnipropetrovsk State University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the T. G. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In April 2023 she visited Stratford-upon-Avon to give the toast ‘To the immortal memory of William Shakespeare’ at the official lunch held in honour of the playwright’s birthday, making a speech so powerful that it was reported in The Guardian and mentioned at Prime Minister’s Questions. Her research has examined, among other things, international Shakespeare festivals, the legacy of the Ukrainian modernist director Les Kurbas, genre in early modern England, Shakespeare in Love, and the subtexts of Kosintsev’s Hamlet. Together with her colleague Maya Harbuzyuk she is assembling an encyclopaedia documenting the translation, performance and reception of Shakespeare in Ukraine.