10 Essential Ukrainian Reads, From Memoir to Novel

Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer and founder of Index: Institute for Documentation and Exchange. She recently published Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War, which will be released in the UK on September 24th. Dovzhyk took part in the Lviv Book Forum, held from September 11-13 in a digital partnership with Hay Festival Global.

This is the fifth year of the forum's partnership with Hay Festival Global, which brings together writers from around the world for three days of hybrid conversations on themes of memory, displacement, grief, and the power of literature. All events from the Lviv Book Forum are available to stream for free on Hay Festival Anytime.

This list of books by Ukrainian authors in English or translated into English highlights a rich literary tradition that has been overshadowed by empires seeking to erase Ukraine. The list was compiled after Russia targeted Ukrainian publishing infrastructure with missiles, destroying over 13 million books in one month—nearly a third of the country's annual print run at the time.

These texts offer a guide to Ukraine's past and present, showcasing literary experiments and diverse cultural geographies. The selection spans genres and registers, from fin-de-siècle feminist mythmaking and trench poetry to postmodern fiction observing an empire's collapse from within.

Lesia Ukrainka, a turn-of-the-century writer, tackled key western canon themes with a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. Her choice to write in Ukrainian, a language persecuted by the Russian empire, denied her representation in the world republic of letters. Nina Murray's fresh translation of Ukrainka's poetic drama Cassandra sheds new light on the Trojan war from a woman's perspective who knew the truth but was never believed.

Victoria Amelina, a war crimes researcher turned novelist, traveled Ukraine documenting bomb craters and survivors' testimonies, fighting for justice alongside women like lawyers, soldiers, journalists, and museum workers. Her unfinished manuscript, Looking at Women Looking at War, received the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.

Maik Yohansen, part of the so-called Executed Renaissance, was a Ukrainian culture maker purged by the Soviet regime in the 1930s. His modernist novel Dr. Leonardo's Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with His Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta, tells the story of an Italian doctor and his "future lover" traveling through northeastern Ukraine, with the landscape serving as the true protagonist in this land of military aggression.