George S. N. Luckyj

George Stephen Nestor Luckyj was born in the village Yanchyn, close to Lviv, the son of a Ukrainian modernist poet and member of the Polish Senate. After public school he went to the University of Berlin to study German literature. Just before the outbreak of World War II, he began a summer study program at Cambridge University in England. His father was taken to a concentration camp, where he died in 1941. In 1943, Luckyj joined the British army and worked as a Russian interpreter in occupied Germany.

In 1947, he moved to Saskatoon, Canada to teach English literature at the University of Saskatchewan. In 1947, he moved to New York to earn his doctorate in Literature from Columbia University. His Ph.D. dissertation was published as Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934. He moved to Toronto to teach at the University of Toronto and helped create the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.