Bohdan Horyn

Bohdan Horyn was born on February 10, 1936, in the village of Kniselo in the Ukrainian SSR, now Stryi Raion, Lviv Oblast.^[3] His father Nikolai was a worker and his mother Stefania was a homeowner.^[4] Bohdan later married Oksana Ivanova, who was a doctor and pensioner.^[4]

He graduated from Ivan Franko Lviv State University, Faculty of Philology in 1959.^[5] He then became a teacher of the Ukrainian language literature, while also working at the House of Folk Creativity in Lviv.^[3] After teaching, from 1962 to 1965, he worked as a research associate at the Lviv Museum of Ukrainian Art, while simultaneously distributing samizdat materials as a member of the Sixtiers movement.^[3] In 1965, he was arrested and then sentenced in a Lviv Regional Court for "anti-Soviet activities" to three years of imprisonment, which he served at the Temlag gulag, which was located within Yavas in the Russian SFSR.^[5] While in prison, he became friends with Opanas Zalyvakha, who was a Ukrainian dissident artist.^[3]

After his release, he took on a variety of odd jobs, until 1976 when he became a senior research associate at the Lviv Art Gallery, which he served at until 1989.^[3] During this time, he became one of the founders of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union in 1988, and for the next two years headed the party's organization for Lviv Oblast.^[3] In 1990—1997 he was a member of the Ukrainian Republican Party Board and Council. He also chaired the party's organization in Lviv Oblast from 1990 to 1992.^[3] In 1997, he joined the central leadership of the Republican Christian Party, and then in 2003 the central leadership of the People's Movement of Ukraine.^[3]

In the 1990 Ukrainian parliamentary election, he became part of the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament of Ukraine. Upon joining, he became par of the "Narodna Rada" (People's Council) faction.^[3] He was again elected for the 2nd convocation in the 1994 Ukrainian parliamentary election, this time joining the electoral bloc "Derzhavnist" (Statehood).^[3]

From 1994 to 1996 he was the director of the Institute for Diaspora Studies.^[5]

In 2019 he won the Shevchenko National Prize in the category "Journalism".^[6]