European Writers’ Festival: War and its Aftermath
Date and time:
Saturday 20 May, 2023
16:00 - 17:15
Location:
Pigott Theatre
The Knowledge Centre, The British Library, 96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB
With Russia’s war against Ukraine overshadowing everything, a panel of award-winning writers from Ukraine and across the continent come together to discuss Europe’s wars past and present, and to ask, have we learned nothing? Reaching back centuries, coming-to-terms with the horrors of World War, and placing us at the very centre of war in Europe today, hear how our panel of exceptional European writers tackle the subject of war and its aftermath as they live through it or assess its impact from the distance of decades. Can literature help us to explain and understand war? In the case of Ukraine, is it actually possible to write prose and poetry when you’re in the midst of madness and destruction?
With Kai Aareleid (Estonia), Chitra Ramaswamy (Scotland), Olena Stiazhkina (Ukraine) and Nachoem Wijnberg (Netherlands). Chaired by Claire Armitstead.
The day pass for Saturday 20th May also includes entrance to two more panels over the course of the day - Stories from the New Europe and Freedom to Write: Writing Freedom.
The weekend pass for Saturday 20th & Sunday 21st May includes entrance to all events on both days - more details here.
Organised by the European Union National Institutes of Culture (EUNIC) London in partnership with the European Literature Network and the British Library, and with the support of the Delegation of the European Union to the United Kingdom and the European Parliament Liaison Office in the United Kingdom.
Speaker
Olena Stiazhkina
Olena Stiazhkina is a historian and award-winning Ukrainian writer and journalist. Her fiction includes short stories, novels, and detective stories. She was a professor of Slavic history at Donetsk National University until the occupation of the city, as well as at Mariupol State University. Having written almost exclusively in Russian before, Stiazhkina transitioned to writing in Ukrainian following the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014.
Stiazhkina’s most recent novel Cecil the Lion’s Death Made Sense (soon to be published in English by Harvard University Press), depicts life in Donetsk, debunking stereotypes about local identities and exploring difficult choices faced by people in the occupied region. Stiazhkina’s novel, In God’s Language also explores life in occupied Donetsk, and an extract of the novel has been translated by Uilleam Blacker for Apofenie. In 2018, this novel was accepted for Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2019 anthology. Stiazhkina is also the author of Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary, which depicts day-to-day developments in and around her beloved hometown Donetsk during Russia’s 2014 invasion and occupation of the Ukrainian city.
