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Liliya Ianovskaia is a sixty-six-year-old Belarusian-Canadian mountaineer who took up climbing at fifty and now holds Guinness World Records on the world's highest peaks.

Liliya Ianovskaia took up mountaineering at fifty. Now, at sixty-six, the Belarusian-Canadian climber holds two Guinness World Records — for K2 and for the Everest–K2 double — and also stands as the oldest known female ascent of Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Kangchenjunga, and Nanga Parbat. Born in Soviet Belarus, raised on the legend of Polish high-altitude climbers, and a Canadian immigrant since the 1990s, she has summited eleven of the world's fourteen 8,000-metre peaks, the first Belarusian and Canadian woman on several of them. Her memoir Above All is forthcoming from Grunwald Publishing.

Liliya Ianovskaia is a sixty-six-year-old Belarusian-Canadian mountaineer who began climbing at fifty and now holds two Guinness World Records on the world's two highest peaks.

Born on 6 August 1959 in Ivenets, west of Minsk, she came of age in Soviet Belarus on the legend of the Polish Himalayan generation of the 1970s and '80s — Wanda Rutkiewicz, Wojciech Kurtyka, Jerzy Kukuczka — whose seasons captured Eastern European imagination but lay beyond the reach of a young woman in the USSR. She earned two degrees from Belarusian State University in mathematics and economics, immigrated to Canada with her family in the late 1990s, and built a working life and a family of three daughters and five grandchildren before moving to the Canadian Rockies.

Mountaineering arrived only at fifty, after the birth of her third granddaughter, when she set out to run a marathon and climb Kilimanjaro and did not stop. Since 2019 she has summited eleven of the world's fourteen 8,000-metre peaks — Cho Oyu, Manaslu, Everest, K2, Gasherbrum II, Lhotse, Dhaulagiri, Makalu, Annapurna I, Kangchenjunga, and Nanga Parbat. She is the first Belarusian-born and first Canadian woman ever to summit K2, and the first Belarusian woman on several other 8,000-metre peaks.

In May 2022 she summited Everest with her youngest daughter, Dasha — the third mother-daughter team in recorded history to do so. Two months later, in July, she became the oldest woman ever to summit K2, and was awarded a second Guinness World Record at the same certification: the oldest woman to complete the Everest–K2 double in a single season. Four further oldest-woman records followed on Dhaulagiri (2023), Annapurna I (2025), Kangchenjunga (2026), and Nanga Parbat (2026). Three eight-thousanders remain: Gasherbrum I, Broad Peak, and Shishapangma.

On every summit Liliya carries the historic white-red-white flag of Belarus alongside the Canadian flag.

Liliya's memoir, Above All — A Memoir of Mountains and the Women Who Climbed Them, traces alongside her own expedition record the largely unrecorded history of Belarusian women in high-altitude climbing. It is forthcoming from Grunwald Publishing in late 2026.