How do we make sense of war, shifting borders, and forced displacement? How can we remember and speak about these things, and how can literature act as a witness, perhaps even bring a sense of justice? And what lessons can we draw from the tumultuous history of Ukraine and Europe to help us understand what is happening today? This special edition of the Ukraine Shelf podcast featuring poet Oksana Maksymchuk and international lawyer and author Philippe Sands was recorded live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The episode is hosted by the podcast's creators Olesya Khromeychuk (author The Death of a Soldier Told By His Sister and director of the Ukraine Institute London) and literary translator and Ukraine scholar, Uilleam Blacker. Books discussed: Oksana Maksymchuk, Still City (Carcanet, 2025) Philippe Sands, East West Street (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2016) and 38 Londres Street (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2025) Guest recommendations: Natalia Vorozhbyt, Bad Roads, translated by Sasha Dugdale (Nick Hern Books, 2017) Józef Wittlin and Philippe Sands, City of Lions: A Portrait of a City in Two Acts: Lviv Then and Now (Pushkin Press, 2023) (Wittlin’s is essay translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones).

In this episode, we talk about one of the most fundamental things in all our lives: food. How can food help us understand culture, identity, and history? How does food bring people together in dark times? How has Ukraine’s status as a major global exporter of food been affected by the war? We discuss all these questions and more with two brilliant food writers - Olia Hercules and Felicity Spector.

Olia Hercules is a British-Ukrainian chef, author and cultural ambassador, she is the author of Mamushka: Recipes From Ukraine & Beyond; Kaukasis: The Cookbook – A Journey Through the Wild East; Summer Kitchens Inside Ukraine's Hidden Places of Cooking and Sanctuary; Home Food and most recently Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story of War, Exile and Hope (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Felicity Spector is a journalist, author and baker. Her work in TV journalism has taken her all over the world, covering everything from the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia to the inauguration of Barack Obama in the US; most recently, she has been a tireless volunteer in some of Ukraine’s most war-torn regions. Her book about these experiences, Bread and War: A Ukrainian Story of Food, Bravery and Hope, was published in 2025 by Duckworth.

Book recommendations:

Olia Hercules:

Lesya Ukrainka, The Noblewoman, translation. Percival Cundy, in Spirit of Flame: A Collection of the Works of Lesya Ukrainka (Bookman Associates, 1950). Translation available online here.

Charlotte Shevchenko-Knight, Food for the Dead (Penguin, 2024)

Lina Kostenko’s poetry (See here for some translations by Uilleam Blacker at Words Without Borders)

Felicity Spector:

Oleksandr Mykhed, The Language of War translation. Maryna Gibson, Hanna Leliv and Abby Devar (Penguin, 2024)

Artur Dron, We Were Here, transl. Yuliya Musakovska (Jantar, 2024)

Victoria Belim, The Rooster House (Virago, 2023)

Also mentioned:

Lesya Ukrainka, Cassandra trans. Nina Murray (Harvard, 2024)

Oleksandr Mykhed, I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal transl. Tanya Savchynska and David Mossop (Northwestern University Press, 2025)

How can we speak and write about war? What role does silence play in this process? What does it mean for people and places to survive war? We discussed these questions and more with two brilliant writers, Maria Tumarkin and Yuliya Musakovska, whose works have interrogated war and trauma in uncompromisingly honest and perceptive ways. This episode of The Ukraine Shelf was recorded in front of a live audience at Dim Zvuku in Lviv in collaboration with the INDEX Institute for Documentation and Exchange.

Our guests:

• Yuliya Musakovska is a multi-award-winning poet and translator from Lviv. She has published six volumes of poetry in Ukrainian and has written for many magazines and journals in Ukraine and internationally. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Her first collection in English translation, The God of Freedom, was published in 2024 by Arrowsmith Press and translated by Olena Jennings with the author. You can read Yuliya’s poetry in English translation here, here, and here.
• Maria Tumarkin is a Ukrainian-Jewish-Australian writer, essayist, and lecturer at the School of Culture and Communication at Melbourne University. She is originally from Kharkiv. Maria has written four books that blend essay, memoir, cultural history and philosophy, often focusing on the ways in which the past, as she puts it, ‘infiltrates’ the present. As well as books, she writes essays, reviews, and pieces for performance and radio.

Books discussed:

• Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic (Fitzcarraldo, 2018) and Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy (Melbourne University Press, 2005)
• Yuliya Musakovska, The God of Freedom, transl. by Olena Jennings with Yuliya Musakovska (Arrowsmith, 2024) Recommendations
• Artur Dron’, We Were Here, transl. Yuliya Musakovska (Jantar, 2024)
• Elina Softić, Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights, transl. Nina Conić (Ruminator, 1996)
• Semezdin Mehmedinović, Sarajevo Blues, transl. Ammiel Alcalay (City Lights, 2021)
• Miljenko Jergović, Sarajevo Marlboro, transl. Stela Tomassević (Archipelago, 2003)

In this episode, we explore the industrial regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. From 2014 until 2022, this was where Russia focused its war of aggression against Ukraine, killing and uprooting thousands of people. Russia claimed these regions were culturally and historically Russian, but history, and the people of these regions themselves, tell a different story: the majority consider themselves Ukrainian, and they overwhelmingly voted for Ukrainian independence in 1991. To get a better understanding of this region’s complex identities and its history as a resource-rich region on the edge of empire, we spoke to Professor Victoria Donovan of the University of St Andrews about her book Life in Spite of Everything (Daunt Books, 2025) and to historian and novelist Olena Stiazhkina about her novel Cecil the Lion Had to Die (Harvard, 2024). (hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291645) Olena Stiazhkina (pen.org.ua/en/members/styazhkina-olena) is a historian and one of Ukraine’s most prominent prose writers. She is originally from Donetsk, where she lived until 2015, when she was forced to flee the Russian invasion. Her historical work has focused on the experience of everyday life in the Soviet Union and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine during World War II. She has written eleven books of prose, and currently has three books available in English: Zero Point Ukraine: Four Essays on World War II (Ibidem, 2021) (cup.columbia.edu/book/zero-point-ukraine/9783838215501/), Ukraine Love War: A Donetsk Diary, translated by Annie O. Fisher (Harvard, 2024) (hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291690) and Cecil the Lion Had To Die, translated by Dominique Hoffman (Harvard, 2024). Victoria Donovan (st-andrews.ac.uk/modern-languages/people/russian/vsd2) is Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms at the University of St Andrews. Victoria’s research explores entangled colonialisms and industrial extraction with a focus on the Ukrainian East. She is the author of Chronicles in Stone: Preservation, Patriotism, and Identity in Northwest Russia 2019; a book co-authored with Darya Tsymbalyuk and others called Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2022) (research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/en/publications/limits-of-collaboration-art-ethics-and-donbas) and her most recent book is Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East (Daunt Books, 2025). Books recommended in this episode:

• Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War (Harper Collins, 2025)
• Volodymyr Kulikov, Iryna Sklokina (eds.), Pratsia, vysnazhennia ta uspikh: promyslovi monomista Donbasu (Centre for Urban History, L’viv, 2018)
• Yevgenia Belorusets, Lucky Breaks (Pushkin Press, 2022)
• Vitaly Matukhno, books produced by his “Gareleya Neotodryosh” project

The Ukraine Shelf's second episode hosts Dr Sasha Dovzhyk and Eugene Finkel to discuss threats to Ukrainian culture and identity Russia has attempted to repress and destroy Ukrainian statehood and identity over two centuries. In this episode, we trace the historical roots of Russia’s current aggression to imperial myths from the early 19th century, and look at how these myths have resurfaced repeatedly over time. We explore the most recent wave of violence through the tragic story of Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian writer who was killed in a Russian missile attack in 2023. The books under discussion are Eugene Finkel’s Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two Hundred Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024) and Victoria Amelina’s Looking at Women Looking at War (Harper Collins, 2025). Guests Dr Sasha Dovzhyk Dr Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, editor, and cultural manager. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Birkbeck, and has taught at Birkbeck and UCL SSEES, worked as a special projects curator at the Ukrainian Institute London, and edited three books. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guardian, European Voices, New Lines, Index on Censorship, CNN, and others. She edits the London Ukrainian Review. Having lived in London for nine years, she has recently moved back to Ukraine to help set up INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange. Eugene Finkel Eugene Finkel is the Kenneth H. Keller Professor of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins University. Finkel's most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024). He is also the author of Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017), and co-author of Reform and Rebellion in Weak States (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Bread and Autocracy: Food, Politics and Security in Putin’s Russia (Oxford University Press, 2023). His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and other journals. Finkel also published articles and op-eds in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Spectator and other outlets.

The Ukraine Shelf's first episode hosts Elmaz Asan and Rory Finnin to discuss Crimea

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine began not in 2022, but in 2014, with the invasion and occupation of Crimea. This episode explores Crimea’s significance as a strategically important nexus between east and west, between Europe, Russia and the Middle East, and as an integral part of Ukraine historically, politically and culturally. The focus of our discussion is Rory Finnin’s book Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (University of Toronto Press, 2022).