Stefanyk, Yurii

Stefanyk, Yurii (Стефаник, Юрій; pseudonyms: Юрій Клиновий; Yurii Klynovy and Юрій Гаморак; Yurii Hamorak), b 24 July 1909 in Stetseva, Sniatyn county, Galicia, d 25 April 1985 in Edmonton, Alberta. Writer and community leader; son of Vasyl Stefanyk. Stefanyk studied law at Lviv University (LLB, 1935) and spent 1936–7 in Canada coediting Ukraïns’ki visti/Ukrainian News in Edmonton. After returning to Ukraine he worked on the magazine Zhyttia i znannia and the monthly Novitnyi remisnyk in Lviv. In 1940, after the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, he was arrested as a Ukrainian nationalist. He was released in 1941, left Ukraine in 1944, and settled in Edmonton in 1948. From 1971 he was president of the Slovo Association of Ukrainian Writers in Exile and edited its irregular serial, Slovo (1970–83). He wrote Moïm synam, moïm pryiateliam (To My Sons and to My Friends, 1981); edited Vasyl' Stefanyk: Tvory (Vasyl Stefanyk: Works, 1942; 2nd edn, 1948), Les' Martovych: Tvory I–III (Les Martovych: Works I–III, nd), and Nasha spadshchyna (Our Heritage, 1979); and coedited (with Jars Balan) Yarmarok: Ukrainian Writing in Canada since the Second World War (1987).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]