Ihor Pavlyuk was born in the Volyn region of Ukraine in January 1967. He studied at the St. Petersburg Military University, which he left in order to pursue his career as a writer. Pavlyuk was, as a result, sentenced to a period of hard labour in the Taiga, working on what was literally a road to nowhere, but regained his liberty in the chaos accompanying the fall of the Soviet Union. He was able, subsequently, to complete his education and become a Doctor of Social Communication.

Pavlyuk’s numerous poetry collections include: Islands of Youth (Острови юності, 1990), Magma (Магма, 2005), Ukraine in Smoke (Україна в диму, 2009) and Masculine Fortune Telling (Чоловічe ворожіння, 2013).

His work has been translated into several languages, including English, French, Polish, Russian and Japanese. In 2008, Pavlyuk was awarded the Peoples’ Taras Shevchenko Prize.