She is Ukraine's leading writer and public intellectual. She is the author of more than twenty books in different genres (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, cultural studies) and has been included in the media as one of the most influential people in Ukraine for years. 

Zabukhko graduated from the Department of Philosophy at the Shevchenko University in Kiiv, received her PhD in Philosophy of Art and has worked as a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In the early 1990s she lectured in the United States and has been a writer-in-residence at Penn State, Harvard and Pittsburgh Universities.

Her best known books internationally are the novels Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996) and The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2010), translated into seventeen languages. Both books have won her numerous national and international awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Ukrainian National Award of the Order of Princess Olha, the Central European Angelus Literary Award and the Ukrainian Shevchenko National Prize, among others. Her most recent publications are Your Ad Could Go Here. Stories (AmazonCrossing, 2020) and Selected Poems (Arrowsmith Press, 2020).