Olena Viktorivna Stiazhkina () is a Ukrainian historian and writer. She is a Doctor of Historical Sciences and a leading research fellow at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
She is known internationally for the novel Cecil the Lion Had to Die, the diary Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary, and the essay collection Zero Point Ukraine: Four Essays on World War II.
From 1993 to 2015 Stiazhkina taught the history of Slavic peoples at Donetsk National University. After the Russian occupation of Donetsk in 2014 she left the city and continued teaching at Mariupol State University in 2015âÂÂ2016. Since 2016 she has been a senior or leading research fellow at the Department of Ukrainian History in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Alongside her academic work, Stiazhkina has been active as a prose writer and journalist, which has won awards.
She has published collections of short stories and novels in Ukrainian and Russian, including works issued under the pen name Olena Iurska. Her fiction often addresses everyday life in the late Soviet period and post-Soviet Ukraine, with attention to the Donbas region.
Her research interests include the history of World War II in Ukraine, women's history, the history of the Donbas, and everyday life under Soviet rule. She has authored scholarly articles and monographs on these topics.