Hnat Martynovych Khotkevych (Ukrainian: Гнат Мартинович Хоткевич, also Gnat Khotkevich or Hnat Khotkevych, born December 31, 1877 – died October 8, 1938) was a Ukrainian theater and public figure, engineer, inventor, writer, historian, translator, ethnographer, art critic, playwright, screenwriter, composer, musicologist, violinist, pianist, baritone, bandurist, and teacher.

Although he was trained as a professional engineer, he is known more as a prolific Ukrainian literary figure, and also as a dramatist, composer, and ethnographer, and father of the modern bandura.

Khotkevych incorporated original folkloric and ethnographic material, in particular folk songs, tales, customs, and even dialectical and lingual differences of the region or time which he was writing about.

English translations of Hnat Khotkevych's works include: As a youth, he had the chance of seeing a number of theatrical performances in Kharkiv.

Because his activities addressed social and national issues, he was forced to emigrate in 1905 to Halychyna (part of Western Ukraine) which at that time, was under Austro-Hungarian rule.

In 1910 whilst in Halychyna he once again organized a theatrical troupe made up of illiterate Hutsuls who had great success touring Western Ukraine performing the ethnographic plays he had created.

He continued writing plays, the most interesting was the work Bohdan Khmelnytsky which chronicles the life and times of the renowned Kozak leader in the mid-17th century.

In 1936 he played the role in the film Nazar Stodolya, which appeared in 1937, but after being shown briefly for two weeks was removed from showings.

When he was expelled from the Kharkiv Polytechnical Institute he joined Mykola Lysenko's touring choir as a bandura soloist.

In 1902, he was asked to read a paper on the music and traditions of the folk bandurists known as kobzars at the XIIth Archeological Conference held in Kharkiv in 1902.

During the congress, he was one of the initiators of the idea of the preservation of kobzar music by means of sound recording using recently invented phonograph.

In 1928, Khotkevych became the director of a special bandura studio, organized to retrain and convert the Poltava Bandurist Capella to play in the Kharkiv style.

Apart from his musical performance and compositions, Khotkevych also produced a number of books on Ukrainian folk instruments,[4] and the bandura specifically.

From 1931, he suffered numerous personal attacks in the Soviet press, which ultimately resulted in all his music and writing being banned in 1932 and him losing all employment.

In post-1991 Ukraine numerous works by this author have been republished and many manuscripts have found their way from the archives into publications due mainly to the efforts of the Khotkevych foundation in Kharkiv.