Ivanenko, Oksana

Ivanenko, Oksana [Іваненко, Оксана], b 13 April 1906 in Poltava, d 17 December 1997 in Kyiv. Writer; sister of Dmytro Ivanenko. After graduating from the Kharkiv Institute of People's Education (1926), she taught homeless juvenile delinquents at the Gorky Colony near Kharkiv and edited the children’s monthly Barvinok. After 1930 she published over 40 collections of children’s prose, most of which were republished in Tvory (Works, 5 vols, 1966–8); three novellas; and the biographical novels Tarasovi shliakhy (The Paths of Taras, 1961, about Taras Shevchenko) and Mariia (1973, about Marko Vovchok). She also translated the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers into Ukrainian. A study of her life and works, by I. Shkarovska, appeared in 1969.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]