Oleh Lysheha
Oleh Lysheha was a Ukrainian poet, playwright, translator and intellectual. Lysheha entered Lviv University in 1968, where during his last year, he was expelled for his participation in an unofficial literary circle, Lviv Bohema. As punishment, Lysheha was drafted into the Soviet army and internally exiled. During the period 19721988, he was banned from official publication, but in 1989 his first book Great Bridge was published. For The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha, Lysheha and his cotranslator James Brasfield from Penn State University, received the 2000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Lysheha is the first Ukrainian poet to receive the PEN award.
Oleh Lysheha was born in 1949 to a family of teachers in Tysmenytsia, a Carpathian village in IvanoFrankivsk Oblast, Ukraine. Twenty years later, Lysheha became a student studying foreign languages at the university in Lviv named after the renowned Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko. In 1972, Lysheha was expelled and drafted to the Soviet army for membership in Lviv Bohema, a dissident group of artists at Lviv University. After serving in the military, the poet returned to his birth place, working at a local factory.
Source: Wikipedia