Petro Jacenko: Writing as a lean startup
– Ukraine
Author, journalist, creative writing teacher. Petro was born and raised in Lviv (and writes a lot about his hometown). However, the author currently works in IT. He is a winner of Ukrainian literary awards including The New Authors and Smoloskyp Award. Petro was a participant of the Gaude Polonia program and the Bank Austria Literaris. He is the author of eight prose books whose works have been translated into German and Polish. In December 2018, Petro Yatsenko won UNESCO Lviv City of Literature first award for his novel Don’t Listen. Don’t Speak. Don’t Look. The author claims that he has applied the technologies of “a lean startup” while working on the novel: he was receiving constant feedback from his future readers. Working with his wife, children’s author Halyna Tkachuk, he has created a course “Let’s code... some scary stories” for young schoolchildren to teach them both programming and creative writing.