Olena Stiazhkina is a Ukrainian writer. Until the Russian occupation in 2014, she lived in Donetsk, where she taught in the history department at Donetsk National University. After fleeing occupation, she founded a nonprofit called “Deoccupation. Return. Education.” She abandoned the Russian language in favor of Ukrainian. She has written novels and collections of essays in addition to academic work. In 2021, she published the novel Cecil the Lion’s Death Made Sense. She is under siege in Kyiv.