Matios was born in the village of
Roztoky in the
Bukovina region, and presently resides in
Kyiv. She has authored 12 volumes of fiction and poetry, including the novel
Sweet Darusya: A Tale of Two Villages (2003), and the collections of stories titled
The Short Life (2001) and
Nation (2002). She has also published
Banquet at Maria Matios', the first cookery book written by a contemporary Ukrainian writer, as well as the controversial
Boulevard Novel. Her interests include
psychology,
ethnography,
gardening and flower-growing. Her
prose works have been translated into
Russian,
Polish,
English,
Serbian,
Belarusian (
...Hardly Ever Otherwise). Her first poems were published when she was fifteen years old. In 1992 she published her first prose writing in Kyiv Magazine. Maria Matios bases her books on the unique experiences of her family, whose roots in the
Carpathian Mountains and the
Hutsul community go back as far as 1790. She was the winner of the "Book of the Year 2004" prize and of the
Taras Shevchenko National Award in 2005 (for her novel
Sweet Darusya: A Tale of Two Villages). Matios was elected to
parliament, after being placed at number 2 on the electoral list of
UDAR during the
2012 Ukrainian parliamentary election. Matios did not take part in the
2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election. == See also ==