Ihor Mironovich Kalynets (Yodoriv, 9 July 1939 - Lviv, 28 June 2025) was a Ukrainian poet who became one of the voices of dissent against Soviet cultural policy. His work celebrates the folk, pagan and early Christian heritage of Ukraine, and he is remembered as a key figure of Ukrainian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.
The son of an agronomist, he grew up in a household that defended Ukrainian traditions. He graduated from the University of Lviv in 1961 and began writing in the 1950s. His first poetry book, The Fire of Kupalo, appeared in 1966 and linked folklore with modern Soviet life. Because later works could not be published at home, they came out in the West.
His opposition to Russification led to a sentence of nine years in a labour camp followed by exile, which he served in the Perm camps in Russia. There he took part in hunger strikes and helped write appeals and chronicles of the camps. After his release in 1981 he worked at the library of the Academy of Sciences in Lviv.
His poetry rarely offers direct denunciation; it prefers cultural allusion and veiled criticism. He refused to dedicate poems to Soviet leaders, but wrote about figures such as Taras Shevchenko. In 2022 he was named People's Poet of Ukraine, and his work remains a reference point for contemporary Ukrainian literature.