Ukrainian wartime voices: poetry and non-fiction
Date and time:
Thursday 4 July, 2024
19:00 - 21:00
Location:
Ukrainian Religious Society of St Sophia
79 Holland Park
London
W11 3SW
Join us for powerful readings and personal testimonies from Ukrainian poets, writers, and activists, capturing the voices of those impacted by the war.
What can words do in times of war? What is the function of art in the face of atrocity? Ukraine and Ukrainian culture are endangered by Russia’s war, which has killed countless writers and artists since the full-scale invasion began on 24 February 2022, as well as destroying museums, libraries and printing houses.
Victoria Amelina, the writer and war crimes investigator killed in a Russian missile strike in 2023, wrote in the preface to the war diary of author Volodomyr Vakulenko, tortured and executed by Russian forces in 2022, that ‘as long as the writer is being read, he is still alive’. In this spirit, we join prize-winning Ukrainian poets Yuliya Musakovska and Olena Huseinova, international manager of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Hanna Khriakova, and award-winning journalist and writer Anna Romandash. They will share, through poetry readings, non-fiction writing and personal testimony, the voices of those who have lost their lives fighting for freedom, the voices of those defending Ukraine now – as soldier-poets on the front line, or as writers and artists on the home front and on the international stage – and their own human experiences and work as creative witnesses to the collective trauma. This confluence of voices forms a multifaceted but united call for resistance to the genocide and obliteration of culture. In conversation with Helen Vassallo of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, University of Exeter.
This event is co-organised by the Ukrainian Institute London, the University of Exeter and UCL SSEES.
Speaker
Yuliya Musakovska
Yuliya Musakovska is a Ukrainian poet and translator. She has published six poetry collections in Ukrainian, most recently Stones and Nails (2024). Her collection The God of Freedom (2021) was among the finalists for the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Prize and the top eight nominees for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize. In 2024, this book was released by Arrowsmith Press in English translation by Olena Jennings and the author. Yuliya has received many literary awards in Ukraine, including the prominent Smoloskyp Prize for Poetry. Her poems have been translated into over thirty languages and published worldwide. In 2023, she paused her 20-year career in business and IT to dedicate herself to cultural activism and global advocacy for Ukraine. As a translator, Yuliya works with English and Swedish languages. She is a member of PEN Ukraine.
Speaker
Olena Huseinova
Olena Huseinova is a radio host, radio producer, and writer. She works at Radio Culture (Suspilne). She received the Ivan Franko Award (jointly with Myroslav Layuk) for the special project 'Lesya Ukrainka: 30 radio stories'. Olena is author of two poetry collections, Open Rider (2012) and Superheroes (2016), as well as three poetry books, including Night Air (2024). Superheroes won first prize in the illustrators’ competition at the international festival Book Arsenal in 2017 as well as several prestigious international awards in the field of book design. She has written essays and other short pieces – including in Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War (Penguin, 2023) – and has also been translated into Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hebrew, Finnish, Lithuanian, Estonian, and other languages.
Speaker
Hanna Khriakova
Hanna Khriakova is a culturologist and the communicational and international manager of Lviv UNESCO City of Literature. Working internationally, she is mostly interested in nuances of languages and translation, specifically in the Ukrainian language and its relations to other languages. Hanna also occupies the position of communication manager in several artistic projects. Recently she performed as part of a team on the 'Unseen Force' project, which highlights through an artistic perspective the difficulties of living in temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Hanna recently joined the team of the Home of Sound institution in Lviv and now is researching how the soundscape affects our self-feeling and how the soundscape of war specifically affects our daily lives.
Speaker
Anna Romandash
Anna Romandash is a multi-award-winning journalist and a writer from Ukraine. She is author of Women of Ukraine: Reportages from the War and Beyond (2023) which tells stories of Ukrainian resilience, courage and also loss amid Russian invasion. Anna writes on human rights all-things-Ukraine for a variety of international media. Her work has been awarded by the Centre for Media Pluralism and Freedom, Internews, Hostwriter, and the European Institute of the Mediterranean. Anna was also named Media Freedom Ambassador of Ukraine for her human rights and media work. Anna is currently writer in residence for the English PEN-PEN Ukraine collaboration 'Stories of Resilience'.
Moderator
Helen Vassallo
Helen Vassallo is Associate Professor of French and Translation at the University of Exeter. She is the founder of Translating Women, an industry-facing research project that engages with publishers, translators, and other stakeholders to work against intersectional gender bias in the translated literature sector of the UK publishing industry. Helen has worked closely with English PEN on the research and development of the digital publishing initiative PEN Presents, which aims to change the landscape of translated literature in the Anglophone world, and she translates Francophone women’s writing, with a particular interest in North Africa and the Middle East. She is currently working on several other translation projects, including her role as project co-lead on translations of Ukrainian war poetry.
