Meet ourFirst Polyglot Literary Resident

Award-winning poet and playwright Suji Kwock Kim is spending a month in Odesa this autumn as our first Cosmopolis–UNESCO Polyglot Literary Resident.

Suji is the winner of the Walt Whitman Award and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. During her residency, she is working on UTOPIA, INC., a new book exploring family history, North Korean refugees, memories of war, and the possibilities of language that resists propaganda.

Ukrainian Cosmopolis

Ukrainian Cosmopolis is an independent civic-intellectual collective based in Odessa and connected to the wider world. We defend freedoms of thought and speech at a time when both are under growing pressure.

Our international team brings together some of Odessa’s most distinguished writers, scholars, artists, and cultural figures alongside friends and fellow travellers from across Ukraine and the wider world.

Our work is driven by the ancient principle of parrhesia — fearless, frank speech that takes social, political, and material risks — because we know that the cost of silence is greater than the risks of free speech. Once thought retreats into silence, societies drift toward fear, conformity, and authoritarianism — the very unfreedoms Ukrainians have been fighting against.

Odessa is one of Europe’s great free ports: a city shaped by the movement of peoples, languages, and ideas, where great musicians and writers learned from smugglers and dockworkers. Odessa’s world-famous music, literature, and cinema are heirs to polyglot frictions, irreverence, and wit. We carry this spirit forward at a time when it is once again under threat.