While studying power engineering in graduate school, Maksym Kidruk preferred dreaming of the Spanish conquest of Mexico to memorizing formulas.
But daydreaming wasn’t a lucrative affair. Skilled in programming, the 27-year-old wrote a successful technical manual, which generated decent royalties and provided enough for him to cross the ocean for the first time.
An epic journey to Mexico two years ago, from the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean, became Kidruk’s first travel novel, “Mexican Chronicles: the Story of One Dream,” a fresh genre to the Ukrainian market. It was not his first trip abroad though that sparked the writer in him.
A simple Ukrainian guy from Rivne with a skill for sciences, he moved to Kyiv to study power engineering and then got a grant to continue technical studies in Stockholm, Sweden, where he started dreaming about exotic places.
Upon return from Mexico, his riveting narratives of ancient ruins and scraggly hills impressed friends enough for one of them to suggest recounting the adventures in a book. As the royalties from his technical book kept trickling in, Kidruk said he could afford writing his first travelogue and novel in Ukrainian.
“The underlying idea of the book was biographical; I learned that you shouldn’t be afraid to lose everything in pursuit of your dream,” shares Kidruk. Indeed, for a while the script of the “Chronicles” drifted from the hands of one publisher to another, with rejections at every stop.
With little hope, the ambitious writer submitted his script to Ukraine’s most prestigious anonymous contest for young writers “Coronation of the Word” in 2009.He won the second-place prize and got an Hr 10,000 award. Soon publishers lined up to publish Kidruk’s Mexican epic.
The royalties from “Mexican Chronicles” paid for Kidruk’s flight and accommodation on Easter Island, his next exotic endeavor.
“Kidruk’s Mexican narrative exuded freshness and positivity,” says Yulia Dzhygastryanska, critic and curator of the contest. “At times, it’s emotional and subjective, yet it has dynamic and is inspiring.”
Swimming with piranhas in Brazil, hunting for crocodiles in Peru, walking unending miles of Sahara desert, and solving the mysteries of Easter Island are recounted in a fresh personable voice.
By now he has published “Mexican Chronicles,” “Journey to the Belly Button of the Earth” and an adventure series of “Screwballs” in Peru and Mexico, written for teens. All the books are selling for around Hr 40.
Some adventures were even life-threatening. On the trip to the Middle East, rushing to see the Baalbek ruins in Lebanon and Dead Cities in Syria, he was caught off guard by a dreadful surprise in Egypt.
Kidruk, a self-described overly confident white tourist, appeared in Cairo at the outburst of the Egyptian revolution in spring. He was surrounded by aggressors armed with knives and rods pressing forward.
That’s when Kidruk wondered if the end of his travels has arrived. Fortunately, a pack of receipts from Egyptian temples found in his pocket proved that he was a harmless tourist and saved him. With the administrative help of the Syrian ambassador in Ukraine, he arrived home with a memorable experience and $20 in his wallet, barely enough to get a cab into town.
Kidruk even managed to protect the dignity of Ukrainian women when traveling to New Zealand. When an Auckland radio station held a scandalous contest “Win a Ukrainian Wife,” a Ukrainian TV channel looked for a volunteer who would meet with the broadcasting authorities to prove that Ukraine is no brothel.
Kidruk, with his nearly fluent English, took on the mission, which along with other petitions helped ban similar game contests in the future.
To continue traveling, Kidruk quit his day job installing heating systems in Kyiv last year and dedicated his efforts to writing. He says that rigorously splits his daily routine between reading and writing for six hours, just as his literary idol Steven King.
The optimism and finances of the young writer aren’t exhausted. “Desire and hard work are crucial,” says Kidruk, who also makes money from lectures, book presentations and magazine articles. The writer says that magazines value his eyewitness accounts of remote places like Easter Island and Sahara.
Kidruk is currently in Angola and Namibia and is keeping his followers updated via facebook.
After the trip, the writer will be back to work on his forthcoming techno-thriller, where his two strengths – travel and technology – converge in a captivating story: a Ukrainian programmer seduced by money takes the job in an isolated laboratory in the deserts of Chile, and tries to prevent a catastrophe.
Kidruk takes high technology details seriously. For accuracy, the writer collaborates with chemistry and IT professors, hoping that this “cosmopolitan genre will relate to people outside Ukraine.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Mariya Manzhos can be reached at [email protected]
