Writing War: New Literature from Ukraine

As a part of UCL Festival of Culture 2018, Dr Uilleam Blacker will give a talk on 'Writing War: New Literature from Ukraine'.

In 2014, Russia launched military operations against Ukraine, annexing Crimea and sparking an armed conflict in the Donbas. These events were shocking and completely unexpected for Ukrainians. Ukrainian writers began to react almost immediately, however. First came poetry shared via social media by poets from eastern Ukraine, then fiction and non-fiction by soldiers and volunteers at the front, and later prose and drama by leading writers. This session will feature readings and discussion of texts that try to make sense of Europe’s forgotten war. Participants include members of the Molodyi Teatr London theatre group Lesya Liskevych and Olesya Khromeychuk, poet Iryna Shuvalova, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Birkbeck, Molly Flynn and UCL lecturer Uilleam Blacker.