Maria Tumarkin – Reflections on Ukraine
Date and time:
Thursday 21 September, 2023
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
Europe House
32 Smith Square
London
SW1P 3EU
Please note that the time the event will start has changed: it will now run from 6.30pm to 8pm.
There will also be a free drinks reception afterwards.
Ukrainian-Jewish-Australian writer and cultural historian Maria Tumarkin has been researching sites of trauma across the world for 25 years. She brings her insights into traumascapes as places of undeniable power and vast cultural (and transcultural) significance to this discussion of Ukraine’s present and future.
In a far-ranging conversation with Olesya Khromeychuk, Tumarkin will talk about Ukraine as a traumascape, the inextinguishable diasporic guilt, fraught identities, the silence of Western cultural elites, and how sites of trauma can become sites of conscience and help lay foundations for Ukraine’s rebuilding.
Speaker
Maria Tumarkin
Maria Tumarkin was born and raised in Kharkiv. She is the author of four books of ideas, including Traumascapes and Otherland. Her most recent book, Axiomatic, won the Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award and was named a New Yorker top ten book of 2019.
Tumarkin is a recipient of the 2020 Windham Campbell Prize in the nonfiction category. She collaborates with musicians and visual artists, and writes pieces for performance and radio. Tumarkin’s work on sites of trauma has influenced researchers and artists worldwide. She is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Melbourne. http://www.
Moderator
Olesya Khromeychuk
Olesya Khromeychuk is the Director of the Ukrainian Institute London. She is a historian and writer. She has taught the history of East-Central Europe at several British universities, and has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Der Spiegel, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Prospect. Khromeychuk is the author of The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister (2022) and “Undetermined" Ukrainians. Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS "Galicia" Division (2013).
