Ambassador Ihor Kharchenko presented to Vera Rich the Order of Princess Olha awarded by the President of Ukraine for her contribution to Ukrainian literature and culture.

Vera's Rich first translation was the Prologue to Ivan Franko’s epic “Moses”.  In 1961 she produced a full-length book “Song out of Darkness” – a selection of poems by Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko.

Since then she has translated and published works by major classic and modern Ukrainian poets, including Lesya Ukrayinka, Mykola Zerov, Mykhaylo Orest, Olena Teluha, Vasyl Symonenko, and Lina Kostenko.  A major collection of Lesya Ukrainka’s works was published by Toronto University Press in 1968.  Her version of Franko’s “Moses” was published in New York in 1972, and a new, parallel text edition of it is about to appear from the University of Lviv.

In 1997,  the Union of Ukrainian Writers awarded her its “Ivan Franko” prize, and in 2005 she was elected a full member of Ukraine’s oldest learned society, the “Shevchenko Scholarly Society”.

In addition to Ukrainian, she has also translated major works from Belarusian (including, under UNESCO sponsorship, the first- ever anthology of Belarusian poetry translated into a west European language) as well as occasional translations from Polish, Romanian, Spanish and Old Norse.  She founded and runs her own poetry magazine MANIFOLD and its associated live poetry group “Manifold Voices”.

Together with her literary work, Vera Rich has translated a number of textbooks and scholarly works in mathematics and the natural and social sciences. For more than 20 years (1969 – 1989) she was Soviet and East European Correspondent of the leading scientific weekly “Nature” and currently contributes regularly to The Times Higher Education Supplement.

She has a keen interest in politics and international affairs (since 1978 she has been a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs) especially issues of human rights and freedom of expression (on which she contributes frequently to “Index on Censorship”), and is a member of both the English and the Belarusian chapters of International PEN.