Stepan Protsiuk  Stepan Vasylovych Protsiuk (; born 13 August 1964 in Kuty, Lviv Oblast) is a contemporary Ukrainian novelist, essayist and poet. Stepan Protsiuk was born on 13 August 1964 in small village Kuty in Lviv Oblast of Ukrainian SSR. His parents were school teachers, and his father was a political prisoner who was sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda before Stepan's birth. Shortly after his birth, Protsiuk's parents moved to Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. Stepan Protsiuk studied in Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University and obtained a PhD (Candidate of Sciences) degree in philology in the Institute of Literature of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Since the early 1990s, he has been living in Ivano-Frankivsk and teaching Ukrainian literature at the Precarpathian National University alongside with his writing career. Stepan Protsiuk is a member the Ukrainian center of PEN International. Protsiuk was a member of National Writers' Union of Ukraine since 1995 until he quit the organization in 2017, claiming that he had "different views on the development of the Ukrainian literature". Protsiuk is married, he is a father to two sons. He currently lives in Ivano-Frankivsk. Stepan Protsiuk started his literary career as a poet in the early 1990s. Along with Ivan Tsyperdiuk and Ivan Andrusiak, he founded poetic group New Degeneration, which was among the most famous Ukrainian poetic groups in the early 1990s. New Degeneration created a controversy among prominent Ukrainian writers and literary critics as, for example, Oles Honchar criticized the group's approach to literature, while Lina Kostenko praised it. In 1992, the group published their first book "New Degeneration" (foreword by Yurii Andrukhovych), which included Protsiuk's collection of poems titled "At the Edge of Two Truths". New Degeneration was active until the mid-1990s. In the late 1990s, Stepan Protsiuk stopped writing poetry and gradually switched to prose works. His first novel "Infection", which is one of his most famous works, was published in 2002 and devoted to social and psychological issues, being set in 20th-century Ukraine. Protsiuk received both praise and criticism for his depiction of national and mental problems of Ukrainians.