A sudden leap to a living author! Oksana Stefanivna Zabuzhko was born in 1960 in Luts'k, Ukraine, North and East of Lviv, in a territory (Volhynia) that was part of Poland until 1945. Her father was an intellectual (who had been repressed, as they express it, during the Soviet period, though he had returned from the Zabaikal region (za Baikalom = out beyond Lake Baikal); her mother was a teacher of Ukrainian literature. The family moved to Kyiv in 1968 after efforts to suppress the Ukrainian language began. She graduated from the Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv with a degree in philology in 1982, received an MA in aesthetics in 1985 and a doctorate in the same in 1987. In 1987 she was accepted into the Writers' Union, and by 1988 she had become a member of the Communist Party of the USSR. (Note those dates though: they were the years of glasnost' and perestroika.) She is now described as a writer, feminist literary scholar, poet, essayist, author of engaged journalism, translator and political activist; her big literary themes are gender and national identity. She has won a bunch of local and international prizes, has been a Fulbright scholar in the US, and has lectured on Ukrainian culture at Harvard and at the University of Pittsburgh - both institutions with excellent Slavic Departments.
You'll have noticed that her name (here and on the book) is spelled with transliteration that suits an Anglophone reader: Ukrainian is written with the Cyrillic alphabet, like Bulgarian and (often) Serbian, so there are competing systems to render the sounds or letters. Slavists often use international phonetic solutions that resemble Czech - so, Zabužko - but the "zh" is what Library of Congress does for the sound made by the letter "s" in "measure." Some Ukrainians emigrated to the US from what used to be Poland, so their last names (...which go into your passport and other official documents, so you have less control!) are spelled à la polonaise, with sz or cz - and my favorite, szcz = щ.
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (Польові дослідження з українського сексу - the first words might also be translated as "field researches) was Zabuzhko's first novel, first puoblished in 1996 (not with the cover we see here); it made a splash since 1) sex hadn't been treated openly in serious literature in the socialist period, and even by 1996 2) women just didn't do that! At the same time, the novel has gone through 13 editions in Ukraine (according to uk.wikipedia.org), and it's often cited as one of the most influential works of the first post-USSR decades, incidentally a time when not as many authors were writing in Ukrainian - Russian had been officially pushed for a long time. (Let me know if you'd like more details about that. There are lots of details.) It has been translated into at least 15 languages, which also tells you something. Our translation is by Halyna Hryn, one of those translators whose every project is worth checking out: she has an excellent sense of what's good quality, plus she's probably the most prominent translator of prose from Ukrainian to English, so the publishers go to her with their important projects.
There is an interesting 2012 review of the novel by Brianna Berbeniuk, described as "a 20-something misanthropist": here.
The title of Zabuzhko's second novel has been translated as Museum of Abandoned Secrets - keep that in mind for when we read Ugrešić. (The 2012 translation into English was done by Nina Shevchuk-Murray, also an outstanding translator.)
Questions for reading: