In 1936, her family moved from Rzhyshchiv to the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv, where she finished her secondary education.

[2] Kostenko has been credited with reviving lyric poetry in the Ukrainian language,[4] and has been called one of Ukraine's greatest female poets.

[5] Ivan Koshelivets, Ukrainian émigré scholar, referred to her writing as "unprecedented" for its deviation from socialist realism.

Together with Ivan Drach, she appealed to the editorial office of the magazine "Zhovten" (now "Dzvin") and to the Lviv writers with a proposal to speak out in defence of the arrested.

The writers did not dare to protest, but filed a lawsuit with the request to admit Bohdan Horyn on bail as the youngest of arrested.

In 1967 Omeljan Pritsak nominated Kostenko and Ivan Drach for the Nobel Prize in Literature along with the older Ukrainian poet and politician Pavlo Tychyna.

[8] In 1968, she wrote letters in defence of Viacheslav Chornovil in response to the defamation against him in the newspaper "Literary Ukraine."

In 1973 Lina Kostenko was blacklisted by Secretary of the Central Committee on Ideology of the Communist Party of Ukraine Valentyn Malanchuk.

Only in 1977, after the departure of Malanchuk, was her collection of poems On the Banks of the Eternal River published,[2] and in 1979, under a special decree of the Presidium of the Socialist-Revolutionary Guard, one of her greatest works was published, a historical novel in the verses Marusia Churai (about a 17th-century Ukrainian folk singer) which had stagnated with recognition for 6 years.

In today’s world, that’s priceless!In 2005, an attempt was made by then-President Viktor Yushchenko to decorate Kostenko as a Hero of Ukraine, the highest reward of the state.

"[1] Amidst the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kostenko criticized the usage of obscene language and publicly opposed its appearance in the media, on billboards, and postage stamps.